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JIBBY JONES 























JIBBY JONES 

A STORY OF MISSISSIPPI RIVER 
ADVENTURE FOR BOYS 

BY 

ELLIS PARKER BUTLER 


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 

ARTHUR G. DORR 



) > 


1 


> 


BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
QZtje &toembe lires# Cambridge 
1923 









COPYRIGHT, 1921 AND 1922, BY THE SPRAGUE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



®fjc l&tljergt&e -pregg 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 

SEP 17 *23 



A752048 



ELLIS OLMSTED BUTLER 

WHO SPENT A SUMMER 
ON JIBBY JONES’S ISLAND 


CONTENTS 


I. Oliver Parmenter Jones i 

II. The Pearl-Diggers 13 

III. The Climbing Rabbit 23 

IV. Do Fish Climb Trees? 36 

V. The Fishing Prize 44 

VI. The Prize-Winner 55 

VII. The Tough Customer 68 

VIII. The Red-headed Bandit 85 

IX. The Abduction of Rover 95 

X. The Treasure Hunt 108 

XI. Where is Greenland? 124 

XII. The Worm Mine 130 

XIII. The Viking Ship 138 

XIV. Uncle Beeswax 145 

XV. The Grape Tree 154 

XVI. Congo Magic 161 

XVII. Grains of Sand 173 

XVIII. Pirate’s Treasure 188 

XIX. The Tough Customer appears 198 

XX. Orlando 208 

XXI. Winged Enemies 221 

XXII. A New Swimming-Hole 232 

XXIII. Treasure Trove 246 

XXIV. The Treasure 256 



ILLUSTRATIONS 


“ This is my big suit ” Frontispiece 

“ I GUESS he’s GOT A REAL NOSE FOR FISH ” 62 

Slapping our knees and chanting away like 

LUNATICS 162 

SKIPPY AND I THREW AN END OF THE ROPE INTO THE 
WELL AND PULLED THE TOUGH CUSTOMER OUT 2l8 


Drawn by Arthur G. Dorr 



JIBBY JONES 


CHAPTER I 

OLIVER PARMENTER JONES 

Everybody knows that the Mississippi River is just 
about the biggest river in the world, and we boys 
who live on the shore of it are mighty proud of it — 
proud of the river and proud of living on the edge of 
it, where we can swim in it and look at it and fish in 
it and row boats on it. If we wanted to we could say 
to each other, “Come on! Let’s go down and swim 
awhile in the biggest river in the world, or, anyway, 
the almost biggest!” 

We could say that, but we don’t. I guess the 
reason is that, when a boy wants to go swimming, he 
thinks about swimming and not about the bigness of 
the river he is going to swim in, because that is sort 
of geography and he gets more than enough geogra¬ 
phy in school, without thinking about it when he 
wants to go swimming. So we generally just hold up 
two fingers and whistle, and, if the other fellow says 
he can’t come, we say, “Oh, come on, why don’t 
you?” and leave the length of the old Mississippi 
and where it rises and where it empties and what 


I 


JIBBY JONES 

States it bounds, and all that sgrt of nonsense, until 
some other time. 

But, anyway, I guess we Riverbank boys have the 
very best of the old Mississippi River, because there 
must be pretty near a thousand miles of it above 
Riverbank and more than a thousand miles of it be¬ 
low Riverbank. So we must be about the middle of 
it. And that ought to be the best, any way you look 
at it. 

Now, it isn’t very often that we boys can find a 
boy we can brag about the Mississippi River to. The 
reason is that not many new boys come to River¬ 
bank and all of us Riverbank boys have an equal 
share in the river — as you might say — and it 
doesn’t do me any good to brag about the river to 
Tad Willing or Skippy Root or Wampus Smale, be¬ 
cause they know as much about the river as I do, and 
they would laugh at me. So, in one way, it was fine 
to have a new boy—one that had never seen our part 
of the river—come to town. That was Jibby Jones. 

I am not exactly right when I say Jibby Jones 
came to town, because he did not exactly come to 
Riverbank. He did not stay in Riverbank. He got 
off the train at Riverbank, with his father and 
mother and his twin sisters and his little brother — 
and two or three trunks — but the whole caboodle 
went right down to the Launch Club float and got 
aboard Parcell’s motor-boat and went up to Birch 
Island. Birch Island is four miles up the river. 
There are about twenty cottages on it and some of 

2 



OLIVER PARMENTER JONES 


the Riverbank folks spend the summer there. Our 
folks do — mine and Tad’s and Skippy’s and Wam¬ 
pus’s folks. 

The cottages on Birch Island stand along the edge 
of the island and they are all set up on stilts. In the 
spring the old Mississippi is apt to get on a rampage 
and flood over the whole island, and that is why the 
cottages are on stilts. If the cottages were on the 
ground, the river would come in at the cottage 
windows when it was high, or wash them away and 
destroy them. 

This year all our folks — Tad’s and Skippy’s and 
mine and Wampus’s folks — went up to the island 
early in July. Our folks own cottages there and we 
all love it; we get up there as soon as we can; we have 
been up there every summer for I don’t know how 
long. 

Well, we hadn’t any more than got settled — got 
the boats out from under the cottages and the mos¬ 
quito screens patched and the tall grass and weeds 
cut — than the Joneses came, and this funny-look¬ 
ing Jibby Jones with them. They took the two- 
story cottage that is called Columbia Cottage. It 
stands on eight-foot stilts and it is a pretty good 
cottage — as good as any on the island. 

Tad and Skippy and Wampus and I were down by 
the river in front of Wampus’s cottage trying to see 
what was the matter with the motor of Wampus’s 
motor-boat when this Jibby Jones came walking up 
along the path and stopped to look at us. 

3 



JIBBY JONES 


“Good-morning,” he said, in a sort of lazy drawl, 
and we looked up and decided we did not like him. 
We thought we hadn’t much use for another fellow, 
anyway, because we four were enough. We four al¬ 
ways hung together and had good enough times by 
ourselves. So we looked up and thought, “Well, we 
don’t want you around!” but he had said “Good¬ 
morning!” so we had to say something. So we said 
“ Hello! ” but not as if we meant it. We thought we 
didn’t want to have anything to do with a fellow that 
said “Good-morning!” when he might just as well 
have said “Hello!” in the first place. 

We went right on fixing the motor-boat. We 
thought we would let him stand there until he was 
tired of it, and then perhaps he would go away. By 
and by he said: 

“Are you mending the motor-boat? Doesn’t it 
go?” 

We wondered what he thought we were fussing 
with it for. It seemed about as foolish a question as 
any question he could have asked us. So I said: 

“Sometimes it goes; what do you think a motor- 
boat is for?” 

Jibby Jones did not answer right away. He 
seemed to be thinking that over. It seemed to take 
him quite a while to make up his mind what the an¬ 
swer was, and we had a good chance to look at him. 

He was queer-looking. That is about the only 
way I can say it — he was queer-looking. He was 
about as old as we were, but at first you thought he 

4 


OLIVER PARMENTER JONES 


was quite a lot older. That was because he was so 
tall; he was almost six feet tall; he was taller than 
my father or Tad’s father and almost twice as tall as 
Wampus’s father, who is short and fat. He was just 
about as tall as Skippy’s father. I never saw such a 
tall boy for his age. 

Another thing that made him look oldish was his 
spectacles. He wore spectacles with big, round 
glasses in them and tortoise-shell rims and handles 
— if the things you put behind your ears are called 
handles. But the thing that made him look the 
queerest was his nose. It was the biggest nose I ever 
saw in my life, or that Tad or Skippy or Wampus 
ever saw. They said so. It was bigger than any nose 
I ever saw on a man, and the funniest thing about it 
was that when you looked right straight at Jibby 
Jones from in front it did not look like a big nose at 
all; it only looked like a big nose from the side. This 
was because his nose was not thick or wide, but only 
long and much. It was straight enough, but it 
started too far up on his forehead and went so far 
out into the air in front of him that it was a long 
way back to his face again. The thing it made me 
think of was a rudder, or the centerboard of a boat, 
only, if it had been a rudder, it should not have been 
on the front of his head, but on the back of it. 

So this Jibby Jones stood thinking, because I had 
said: “What do you think a motor-boat is for?” 

After a while he nodded his head as if he had 
thought enough and said: 

5 



JIBBY JONES 


“That’s a good question. I never thought of that 
question before, but, when you think about it like 
that, motor-boats are used for different things, 
aren’t they?” 

“Yes; for climbing church steeples,” Skippy said, 
joking him. 

Jibby Jones looked at us thoughtfully. 

“I think you’re teasing me,” he said. “A great 
many people tease me. It is because I look stupid. 
But I am not as stupid as I look.” 

Wampus nudged me. 

“Who told you that?” he asked Jibby Jones. 

“My father told me,” Jibby Jones said, and he 
did not even crack a smile. He was in dead earnest. 
“My father has said to me, several times, ‘Son, you 
are not as stupid as you look.’ ” 

“Well, he ought to know,” Tad said. 

“Yes, that’s what I think,” Jibby Jones said. “I 
always think my father ought to know, because he is 
an author and writes books. An author who writes 
books has to know a great many things.” 

Well, Tad put down the wrench he was using then 
and looked at Jibby Jones again, and I guess we all 
looked at him. We had heard that some author man 
was coming to Birch Island, and we knew this must 
be the author man’s boy. So we took a good look at 
him. I don’t know what we would have said next, or 
whether we would have said anything, but Jibby 
Jones spoke: 

“What I was thinking, when I said motor-boats 

6 


OLIVER PARMENTER JONES 


were used for various things, was that I saw one 
used on the Amazon as a coffin. A man father knew 
was bitten by a snake and died and the natives used 
his motor-boat as a coffin to bury him in. That was 
what I meant. I have never seen a motor-boat used 
to climb church steeples. I mean actually to climb 
them. The nearest I have come to seeing that was in 
Nebraska when they used a motor-boat to ring the 
fire-alarm bell.” 

Tad was just going to pick up his wrench again, 
but he did not do it. He let it lie. He looked right 
straight at Jibby Jones. 

“To ring a fire-alarm bell!” he exclaimed. 

“It was at Europa, Nebraska,” said Jibby Jones, 
as if he was saying the commonest thing ever, 
“when the Missouri River went over the levee and 
swamped the lower part of the town. They used the 
bell in the steeple of the Methodist Church as a fire 
alarm and a house in the upper part of the town 
caught fire — up on the hill, you know — and they 
had to give the alarm, because it was at night. And 
the church was entirely under water, except the bell 
and the steeple. So my father and another man took 
a motor-boat and went to the church steeple and 
rang the alarm bell. But I never really saw a motor- 
boat used to climb a steeple.” 

We couldn’t say anything. We were stumped. 
He was too much for us. But he went right on: 

“I don’t mean to say it could not be done,” he 
said. “I suppose a motor-boat could be fixed with 

7 


JIBBY JONES 


cog wheels or claws so it could be used to climb 
steeples. I expect that is what you meant.” 

“Oh, yes!” Skippy said. “That’s what we meant, 
of course!” 

He said it as sarcastical as he could, but this Jibby 
Jones did not turn a hair. 

“ I suppose so,” he said. “ I make it a rule never to 
doubt anything any one says, because such strange 
things can be done. I remember when I was on the 
St. Lawrence River—” 

“Don’t you mean the Nile?” interrupted Skippy. 
“Don’t you mean they used motor-boats to hunt 
hippopotamuses on the Nile?” 

“I suppose they do,” said Jibby Jones, “but I 
did not see them doing it when I was on the Nile. I 
was only going to say I saw them use a motor-boat 
to save one ninth of a cat on the St. Lawrence.” 

“One ninth of a cat!” cried Wampus, and began to 
laugh. “ How would you save one ninth of a cat?” 

“It was starving to death,” said Jibby Jones, 
quite seriously. “We were at Clayton and some one 
brought news to father that a cat was on one of the 
Thousand Islands. They said it was so wild no one 
could get near it, but father loves cats and cats love 
father, so he said he would go in a motor-boat and 
save the cat from starving. So he did. He got the 
cat and brought it back to Clayton.” 

“But that was the whole cat,” said Wampus. 

1 “No,” said Jibby Jones quite seriously, “it was 
only one ninth of a cat. You know a cat has nine 

8 


OLIVER PARMENTER JONES 


lives. And father said there was no doubt that cat 
had already lost eight of its lives by starvation, so, 
of course, what he saved was only one life, and that 
was only one ninth of the cat. I am sure that is right 
because we kept the cat for years and we always 
called it Ninth. That was the name father gave it, 
because it was only one ninth of a regular cat. We 
kept it until it was drowned in the Rio Grande.” 

He pronounced it Ree-o Grandy, but we knew 
what he meant. It is the river that is between Texas 
and Mexico. Tad drew a deep breath. 

“You must think you have been on nearly every 
river in the world, don’t you?” he asked. 

“I have, nearly,” said this Jibby Jones. He did 
not say it in a bragging way, either. He said it as if 
it was so. 

“Have you ever been on the Mississippi before?” 
Tad asked him. 

“Not this part,” Jibby Jones said. “I’ve been on 
the upper Mississippi, and on the lower Mississippi, 
but father saved this middle part of the Mississippi 
until last.” 

Tad picked up his wrench and tapped on the side 
of the motor-boat sort of carelessly. 

“Well,” Tad said, winking at us, “I’ve not seen 
many rivers. I’ve seen the Cedar River and the 
Iowa River and the Rock River, and that is about 
all, but I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll tell you this: this 
middle part of the Mississippi is the greatest old 
river in the world. That lower Mississippi is too big, 

9 


JIBBY JONES 


and that upper Mississippi is too little, but this 
middle Mississippi is just right. And it don’t make 
any difference what you think you know about other 
rivers, it don’t do you any good when you come to 
our old Mississippi. This is a real river. It’s differ¬ 
ent.” 

“So father said,” said Jibby Jones. ' 

“Yes,” said Tad, “and this is no river for a raw 
boy to monkey with until he learns about it. What 
is your name?” 

Then Tad winked at us again, but Jibby Jones did 
not see him wink and he answered as sober as a 
judge. 

“ My name,” he said, “is Oliver Parmenter Jones, 
but nobody calls me that. Nearly every one calls me 
Jibby. They call me that because of my nose; it is 
like the jib on a sailboat, you see. Don’t you think 
it is? 

He turned sideways so we could see that his nose 
was like the jib of a sailboat! I never saw such a 
fellow! He did not merely pretend to be proud that 
his nose was like the jib of a sailboat; he really was 
proud of it. Later we learned he was proud of his 
nose because it was like his Grandfather Parmen- 
ter’s nose. Jibby was the only one in his family that 
had the Parmenter nose. I thought it was a queer 
thing to be proud of. 

“So you can call me Jibby, if you want to,” Jibby 
Jones told us, just as if he did not doubt we would 
want to call him something. “ I rather like Jibby,” 

io 


OLIVER PARMENTER JONES 


he said; “it sounds nautical. But you can call me 
Main Mast if you’d rather. Quite a few call me 
Main Mast. That’s because I’m so tall. Father and 
mother call me son, but you wouldn’t like to do that. 
And the twins and brother call me Wally. I don’t 
like that so much. It suggests a walrus. Do you 
mind if I help you with the motor-boat? I know 
quite a little about motor-boats.” 

Well, he did! He came down the bank and in two 
minutes he had the motor-boat chugging away like 
an old-timer! 

“Father says I have a nose for motor troubles,” 
he told us. 

After that we let him be one of us. We couldn’t 
be really mean to a fellow like that; he was too good- 
natured and willing, and too much fun, too. He was 
the queerest boy we ever knew. One day he came 
out in an old suit that was so small for him that the 
pants came halfway to his knees and his sleeves 
came only about halfway to his wrists. He did look 
funny! But we did not say anything; a fellow don’t 
care much about clothes. Jibby Jones said it. He 
said: 

“ I don’t like this suit any more. I like my small 
suit better.” 

We could not believe we heard him correctly. 

“Your small suit!” I said. “You mean the big one 
you have been wearing. I should think you would 
call that your big suit and this one your small suit. 
That one is twice as big as this one.” 

ii 


JIBBY JONES 


“ No,” he said, “this is my big suit. I got this suit 
two years ago and we all call this my big suit because 
when I got it it was too big for me. And the other 
was a little small for me when I got it this spring; so 
it is my small suit.” 

That was how he figured it out, and nobody could 
make him believe the small suit should be called the 
small one. It had been the “big suit ” once, and that 
was the name of it, so it was always the “big suit.” 
We thought he was stupid. But he wasn’t. Not 
when you came to find out. He looked at things a 
different way from the rest of us, that was all. 


CHAPTER II 

THE PEARL-DIGGERS 

Well, it took us quite a while to learn that Jibby 
Jones was not as stupid as he looks, and that when 
he looks stupidest and says the queerest things is 
when he is farthest from being stupid. That is when 
that old brain of his is working hardest. It took us 
a couple of weeks to learn that, and to get to liking 
Jibby the way we did, and I don’t know that Wam¬ 
pus ever did think, in the bottom of his heart, that 
Jibby was anything but stupid and lucky. 

And at first we did try to “string” old Jibby good 
and plenty. We told him things about our river that 
would not have fooled a mud-cat or a carp. And 
when we told those things to Jibby, he would look 
at us through his spectacles in that serious way of 
his, and sometimes we were sure he believed the 
nonsense, and sometimes we were not so sure. 

One thing we told him was about getting mussel 
shells out of the river. That is quite a big business 
around Riverbank because there are so many pearl- 
button factories in Riverbank and they have to have 
shells to cut the buttons out of. The shells they use 
are mussel shells — a sort of clam shell — and 
hundreds of men dredge for the shells. Some of the 
men rake up the shells with long two-handled rakes 
and others drag for them with dull hooks strung on a 

13 


JIBBY JONES 


long cross-bar. The mussels sort of bite the hooks 
and hang on and the dredgers pull them up. 

Jibby Jones knew all this; we couldn’t fool him 
about it because his father had told him; but we did 
try to fool him about another part of it. That was 
about getting mussel shells that had real pearls in 
them — the pearls the women, wear for jewelry. 
Tad was the one that tried to fool him about that. 
I guess Jibby asked Tad how they got the pearls, be¬ 
cause Tad’s father was a pearl-buyer. 

“Well, that’s a pretty hard job, Jibby,” Tad told 
him. “Not many people want to try diving for 
pearls in the old Mississippi, I can tell you! No, 
sir!” 

“Why?” Jibby asked. “I never heard of sharks 
in the Mississippi, or alligators this far north.” 

“Well, I should say not!” said Tad. “If there 
were sharks and alligators here, too, nobody would 
ever dive for pearls. No, sir! It isn’t sharks or alli¬ 
gators, it’s mud!” 

“ Mud?” Jibby asked. 

“Yes, sir! Mud!” Tad told him. “Common old 
Mississippi River mud. That’s why so few hunt 
pearls; that’s why pearls are so high-priced. The 
mud is awful. The mussels with real pearls in them 
don’t lie right on top of the mud like common but¬ 
ton-shell mussels; they burrow down in the mud. 
The minute a mussel feels a pearl beginning to grow 
in it, it begins to burrow.” 

Of course, Skippy and Wampus and I could 


THE PEARL-DIGGERS 


hardly keep from shouting out loud when Tad said 
all this nonsense, because there wasn’t a true word 
in it, but Jibby Jones just stared at Tad through his 
spectacles and believed it all. Or we thought he did. 

“I should think they could dredge a little deeper 
and get them,” Jibby said. 

“Dredge deeper?” said Tad, because he did not 
know just what to say to that. 

“Pshaw!” Skippy put in. “Dredge deeper! 
That would be a nice thing to do, wouldn’t it? And 
the minute the mussel felt the dredge, it would spit 
out the pearl and that pearl would be lost forever. 
You can’t dredge for pearl mussels, Jibby.” 

“Of course not!” said Tad. “You have to dive 
for them. You — you — ” 

Tad had to think quick to think up some ridicu¬ 
lous thing to tell Jibby, but Tad was a good one at 
that and he did it! Yes, sir! 

“You have to do the only way it can be done, if 
you want to get pearls,” he said. “You have to nose 
them out.” 

He stopped short and looked at Jibby’s nose. 

“Why, you’d make the finest kind of pearl-diver 
yourself, Jibby,” he said. “You’ve got a splendid 
nose for it. You’ve got the best nose I ever saw for 
pearl-diving in the Mississippi.” 

“ Do you think so? ” Jibby asked, as pleased as pie. 

“ I know so,” Tad told him. “You’ll know so, too, 
when I tell you how the divers have to get the pearl¬ 
bearing shells. There’s only one way. The pearl- 

15 



JIBBY JONES 


bearing mussel is the scariest thing in the world; a 
rabbit is brave alongside of a mussel that has a pearl 
in it. The slightest hard thing frightens a pearl 
mussel half to death and starts it digging deeper into 
the mud, and then you never can get it. 

“They’re timid?” asked Jibby Jones as if he 

understood. 

“Timid and tender,” said Tad. “When a mussel 
is bearing a pearl its shell is ten times as tender as 
a deer’s horns when they are in velvet. The least 
touch of anything hard hurts the mussel and makes 
it drop its pearl. That’s why the pearl-divers root 
them out with their noses.” 

“Is that the way they do?” asked Jibby. 

“Of course! You can’t use a hook, because it is 
too hard; and you can’t use a rake because it is too 
hard; and you can’t even use your hands, because of 
your finger nails. The only way you can root out a 
pearl mussel is with your nose. The end of a nose is 
soft and does not hurt the mussel. They like the feel 
of it.” 

Jibby Jones felt the end of his nose. 

“It is soft, isn’t it?” he said, as if he had never 
discovered that before. 

“Of course, it is soft!” said Tad. “And that is 
why the pearl-divers of the Mississippi use their 
noses. The only trouble is that they can’t keep at the 
job long; they wear their noses down so that they are 
not fit to dig with. Then they are of no more use in 
rooting for pearl mussels. A man with a bunty nose, 

16 


THE PEARL-DIGGERS 

or with a pug like Wampus Smale’s nose, is no good 
at all.” 

“I expect my Grandfather Parmenter — ” Jibby 
began, but we all knew what he was going to say. He 
was going to say his Grandfather Parmenter would 
have made a good Mississippi pearl-diver. Jibby did 
not finish saying it. He thought of something else. 

We were in the motor-boat, back in Third Slough, 
fishing for bullhead catfish. They were not biting 
very well, which was why we had so much time to 
talk; bullheads do not mind talk; they’re stupid. 

Well, we knew there was not much use fishing 
just then. The river was too high and too low; too 
much both and too much neither. But we had come 
because Jibby had wanted to come. It was the last 
chance he would have to fish with us. The reason 
was that his father had decided they must leave 
Birch Island sooner than they had expected and go 
back to New York. And the reason of that was that 
Mr. Jones had been asked by a publisher to write a 
book about spending a summer on an island in the 
Mississippi and the publisher had suddenly decided 
he did not want that book. So Mr. Jones thought he 
could not afford to spend any more time on the is¬ 
land. The publisher had expected to send Mr. Jones 
a thousand dollars, but now he would not, and this 
was the last day we were apt to spend with Jibby, 
fishing together and things like that. 

“How do they do,” Jibby asked Tad, “when they 
dive for mussels and root them out?” 

17 


JIBBY JONES 


“Why, it is as simple as pie if you have the right 
kind of nose,” Tad said. “You dive from a boat in 
a slough or some other muddy place — some place 
with a muddy bottom — and when you reach the 
mud you take hold of the mud with both hands. 
That is to hold you down. Then you begin rooting 
in the mud with your nose. You root here and you 
root there, as fast as you can, and if you don’t find a 
mussel you come up for breath.’’ 

“Of course. One would do that,” said Jibby, as 
serious as an owl. “ But if one roots out a mussel?” 

“Oh! Then you have to open your mouth and 
grab it quick,” said Tad, nudging me. “Like 
mumblety-peg. When you root up a shell with your 
nose, you open your mouth and grab the shell and 
then come up as quick as you can; but you have to 
be sure you don’t open your mouth until you get in 
the boat. If you do, the mussel will open its shell 
and spit out the pearl.” 

Jibby Jones looked over the side of the boat. 

“ Do you think this would be a good place to dive 
for pearls?” he asked, sort of wistfully. 

“This? This is one of the finest places in the 
Mississippi,” Tad said. “I’m surprised there is no 
one diving right now.” 

I had to turn my head away and grin. The water 
was not five feet deep where we were. 

“ I am going to dive for a pearl,” Jibby Jones said 
suddenly. 

“That’s a good idea,” Tad said. “The bullheads 

18 


THE PEARL-DIGGERS 


are not biting, anyway. That’s always a good sign; 
bullheads hardly ever bite where there are mussels. 
And there couldn’t be a better day to get a pearl. 
The sun is just right. It is low enough to slant on 
the water and not dazzle the mussels. When they 
are dazzled, they go deeper in the mud. They ought 
to be near the top of it now.” 

“ I can stay under water quite long,” Jibby said as 
he began to take off his clothes. “I stayed under 
water so long once, in the River Niger, that father 
was afraid I was drowned. So don’t worry if I stay 
down long.” 

“We won’t,” Tad said. 

It took Jibby quite a while to get ready; he was 
always slow. Then he stood on the gunwale of the 
motor-boat and put his palms together and dove. 
He did not have far to dive; he must have run his 
head into the soft black mud up to his ears, for he 
was up in a second, shaking his head and holding 
onto the boat. 

“It isn’t as deep as I thought it was,” he said as 
he wiped the mud from his face. “ I did not do that 
dive very well. I’ll have to try it again.” 

“We would go in with you,” Skippy said, “only 
our noses are so blunt it is no use.” 

Jibby climbed into the boat and made ready 
again. This time he took a slanting dive. We could 
see him under water; he looked yellow under all that 
yellow water. We could see his arms spread out as 
he dug his fingers into the mud to hold on, and we 

19 


JIBBY JONES 


could see his head move as he ploughed Into the mud 
with his nose. We laughed like fury. It was the 
funniest thing I ever saw. 

He did stay under water quite a while. He had 
not fibbed when he said he could stay under a long 
time. 

Wampus got frightened. “We’d better get him 
out,” he said. “He’ll drown, with his nose and 
mouth full of mud that way.” 

Tad was watching pretty close. “No, he’s all 
right,” he said, as well as he could for laughing. “As 
long as his head keeps bobbing that way, he is all 
right; watch him nose-digging for the great pearl 
mussels of the Mississippi! I hope a mussel don’t 
bite his nose off! ” 

Just then Jibby started to come up. He wiggled 
and squirmed himself onto his knees and staggered 
to his feet. After he began to wiggle, we could see 
nothing but muddy water, and when he stood up 
his face and head were one mass of soft mud. It 
dripped from him and ran from him, but he just put 
his face over the side of the boat and opened his 
mouth and let a mussel shell fall inside. 

“Catch it! ” he gasped; “catch it! ” — as if it was 
a rabbit or something that could jump and run, and 
then he ducked down and sloshed water over his 
head until he was as clean as any one could ever get 
in that old slough water. He came up smiling. 

“Well, I got one!” he drawled triumphantly. 
“ I hope it is a big pearl. I hope it is big enough to 

20 


THE PEARL-DIGGERS 


sell for enough money to let father stay here the rest 
of the summer. That’s what I want it for. Because 

I like you fellows. You are all so helpful and 
friendly.” 

# rn sa y 1 felt ashamed then. So did Tad and so 
did Skippy. I guess Wampus did, too. We all did. 
We did not know what to say. 

But Jibby, naked as could be, was in the boat now 
and he picked up the shell. 

“I hope it did not have time to get rid of the 
pearl, he said. “I hope I did not frighten it too 
much; I hit it rather hard with my nose. Let me 
have your knife, Wampus.” 

Wampus had a big knife, a regular frog-stabber. 

“Jibby — listen!” Tad said, but Jibby was open¬ 
ing the mussel. He seemed to know how. I suppose 
he had opened oysters in the Seine or somewhere; 
he never told us. He slid the knife between the two 
valves of the shell of the mussel, and cut the muscle 
part, and the shell fell open. 

“It looks like quite a good one,” was the next 
thing we heard Jibby Jones say, just as matter-of- 
fact as if he was talking about a dictionary or an 
apple. 

We all stood up, then, and looked. 

“Merry Christmas! Mer-ry Christmas! And a 
Hap-py New Year!” Tad exclaimed. “Well, what 
do you know about that!” 

Right there in the shell was the biggest, pinkest, 
glisteningest, roundest pearl I ever saw in my life! 

21 


JIBBY JONES 

No, I’ll say it was twice as big as any pearl I ever 
saw! 

“A thousand dollars!” Tad cried. .“That’s worth 
a thousand dollars if it is worth a cent! I know! My 
father buys them.” 

We were all crazy with excitement except Jibby 
Jones. He took it quite calmly. 

“I’m glad it is a thousand-dollar one,” he said. 
“Now father can stay on Birch Island the rest of 
the summer.” 

And that was about all he ever said about the 
pearl, even when Tad’s father paid twelve hundred 
dollars for it. Wampus did ask Jibby if he didn’t 
expect to go back and dive for a lot more pearls. We 
thought he would say he meant to. 

“I think not,” Jibby Jones said. “You see, Tad 
says the pearl-divers are apt to wear their noses 
down to a snub, bumping them into the shells, and I 
wouldn’t like to do that. My nose is the only nose in 
our family that is like Grandfather Parmenter’s and 
I wouldn’t like to wear it down to a pug.” 


CHAPTER III 

THE CLIMBING RABBIT 

Maybe feeling sorry that Jibby had to go away was 
what made us feel so glad he had found that pearl 
and did not have to go. Teasing him had come to be 
part of the fun we counted on having, and, when we 
saw old Jib come out of his cottage, one or the other 
of us would nearly always say: “There’s Jibby — 
let’s go tell him something about the river.” And 
between-times we thought up things to tell him. 
But all the time we were getting to like him more 
and more. 

A couple of days after Mr. Willing had bought 
the pearl, Skippy and Wampus and Tad and I were 
under my folks’ cottage, because it was raining. 
There was always plenty to do on the island, enough 
kinds of fun each summer to keep us busy ten years, 
and on rainy days we could always sit under one of 
the cottages and whittle or talk or make mud stat¬ 
ues. The rain was coming down in regular slats, as if 
it meant to rain all day and all night, and we were 
talking about one thing and another when Jibby 
Jones came dodging through the rain and looked in 
at us. 

“Hello, Main Mast,” Skippy called out to him; 
“lower yourself and blow in out of the rain.” 

Sometimes we called him “Main Mast” and 

23 


JIRBY JONES 


sometimes we called him “Jibby”; he never cared 
what we called him. So he came in out of the wet 
and sat on a box. For a minute or two he watched 
us making mud animals, or whittling, or whatever 
we were doing. Then he said: 

“Do you know whether anybody named M’rell 
ever lived in Riverbank, or down below Riverbank, 
or up here above Riverbank? A man named M’rell? ” 

“No,” I said, and Tad and Wampus and Skippy 
said the same. None of us had ever heard of any¬ 
body named M’rell. 

“ Nobody named that ever lived around here that 
I ever heard of,” Tad said. “Why?” 

“I thought maybe you did know of somebody 
named M’rell that had lived somewhere around 
here,” Jibby said. 

“Orpheus Cadwallader might know,” I said, for 
Orpheus was the caretaker of the island and knew 
nearly everybody up and down the river. And then 
we talked about something else, and that was a 
pity, for if we had asked Jibby another question 
about M’rell just then, we might have saved a lot 
of time in starting our hunt for the land pirate’s 
treasure. If we had asked him how he spelled 
M’rell, we might have saved weeks and weeks. So, 
after half an hour or so, Jibby spoke of M’rell again. 

“When I was down on the St. Francis River — ” 
he began, and we all yelled, because the rivers Jibby 
had been on were getting to be a joke. You couldn’t 
mention a thing but it reminded Jibby of some 

24 



THE CLIMBING RABBIT 


river he had been on — the Nile or the Hudson or the 
Amazon or some other river. It was all true enough, 
too, because his father wrote books about rivers and 
had been on most of the rivers in the world, and had 
taken Jibby there; but it was a sort of joke the way 
old Jibby was always dragging in a river, no matter 
what we were talking about. So he waited until we 
stopped hooting, and then he went on. 

“It occurred to me,” he said, “that it was selfish 
of me to keep what I know about M’rell to myself, 
because you boys are so good to me. When I was 
down on the St. Francis River with father, there was 
an old negro named Mose, who said he was over one 
hundred years old. He used to paddle us around in a 
skiff when we went fishing for bass and he told us 
about M’rell.” 

“Who was M’rell?” Wampus asked. “What has 
M’rell got to do with us?” 

Now, I want you to notice, right here, that Jibby 
said “M’rell” and that we all said “M’rell” because 
he did. And the reason Jibby pronounced the name 
that way was because that old negro Mose had 
called it that. The name was really Murrell, 
when we came to find out. If we had seen that 
name written or spelled out, we would not have 
called it “M’rell”; we would have called it “Murr¬ 
ell,” more as if it was “Murl.” But Jibby called it 
“Mur -rell,” more as if it was “M’rell.” And “Murl” 
and “M’rell” don’t sound at all alike. His way was 
as if it rhymed with “tell,” like: 

25 



JIBBY JONES 


“Listen, my children, and I will tell 
A wonderful story about M’rell.” 

The way we pronounced that name was as if it 
rhymed with “squirrel,” like this: 

“ Once there was a pretty squirrel 
That was owned by John A. Murrell.” 

Anyway, Wampus asked, “ What has M’rell got to 
do with us?” and Jibby went ahead and told us, 
sitting there under our cottage out of the rain. 

“It’s about a land pirate’s treasure,” he said. 
“ Father says it is probably nonsense, and that there 
are a million chances to one that there is no treasure, 
and that if there ever was any I could never find it.” 

“What is a land pirate?” Skippy asked. “ I never 
heard of one.” 

“ Neither had I until I was down on the St. Fran¬ 
cis River,” said Jibby. “That river is in Missouri 
and Arkansas, and it empties into the Mississippi 
just above Helena, Arkansas. Father was in Helena, 
Arkansas, studying that part of the Mississippi 
River, and that is one of the parts of the South 
where the land pirate did his pirate work — around 
Helena and thereabouts.” 

He stopped to chuckle. 

“What are you laughing about?” 1 asked him. 

“Why, about the Helenas,” Jibby said. “When 
father and I were on the Yellowstone River, at 
Billings, Montana, we happened to mention Helena, 
Montana, and the folks said, ‘Up here in Montana 

26 


THE CLIMBING RABBIT 


we don’t call it Hel-e-na; we call it Hel’na. The 
town in Arkansas is Hel-e-na, but ours is Hel’na,’ and 
when we got to Helena, Arkansas, and called it Hel- 
e-na, they said, ‘Down here in Arkansas we don’t 
call it Hel-e-na; we call it Hel’na. The town in 
Montana is Hel-e-na; but ours is Hel’na.' 

At any rate, Jibby went on, “the Mississippi at 
Helena is mostly muddy and not good for bass fish- 
ing, but the St. Francis is clearer, so we went up to 
the St. Francis to see what it was like and to catch 
some bass. And the old negro named Mose told us 
about this John A. Murrell, who was the greatest 
land pirate that ever lived, and had ten times as 
many men as any sea pirate that ever sailed the 
seas. He pirated all the way from Tennessee to 
Mississippi and Arkansas — ” 

“But what has that to do with Iowa and us?” 
Wampus asked. “That’s about a thousand miles 
from here.” 

“That is what I am coming to,” Jibby said. “ It 
was away back in 1835, and around then, that John 
A. Murrell was a land pirate. And you want to re¬ 
member that John A. Murrell was not a one-horse 
horsethief; he was a big land pirate. He had about 
one thousand men helping him. They stole slaves 
and horses and carried them away and sold them, 
and robbed and stole and broke every law there was. 
There were two sorts of Murrell’s men. Two hun¬ 
dred and fifty of them were the Grand Council, and 
did the planning, and furnished the brains, and seven 

27 


JIBBY JONES 


hundred and fifty others did the mean work — stole 
and robbed. But that was not all. There were hun¬ 
dreds and hundreds of people who seemed respect¬ 
able who helped John A. Murrell. Some were in the 
gang and got part of the loot, and some were just 
afraid of him and helped him because they thought 
he would murder them and steal their slaves and 
cattle, and burn their houses and barns if they did 
not help him.” 

“That don't mean there is any treasure anywhere 
where we could get it,” said Wampus, who was al¬ 
ways objecting to things. 

“That’s what I’m coming to,” Jibby Jones said, 
“All through that country there were people who 
were afraid of John A. Murrell and his gangs, and 
they sheltered the pirates and fed them and hid 
them when the pirates were in danger. They were 
willing to hide the negroes and the horses the gang 
stole. And the sign that a man was a friend was one 
lone pine tree planted in the corner of a yard or of a 
farm or plantation. That was the sign of a friend’s 
place. Whenever any of the Murrell gang saw a lone 
pine in a corner, they knew it was safe to go there 
and ask shelter or food or a hiding-place. The land 
piracy was so huge and successful that John A. 
Murrell grew so bold he planned a gigantic uprising 
of negroes and Murrellers all over the South, to make 
a new nation and grab everything, but the news of it 
leaked out and he was caught and jailed. And not a 
cent of his money was ever found.” 

28 


THE CLIMBING RABBIT 


“But how does that prove — ” 

“Wait!” Jibby drawled. “The old negro Mose, 
when he was paddling us up and down the St. 
Francis River, said he wished he was young and 
spry again, because if he was he would go up the 
Mississippi to Iowa, and hunt for the land pirate’s 
treasure. He said his father had been John A. 
Murrell’s slave and bodyguard and private servant. 
He said he had a map hidden away in a safe place — 
a map John A. Murrell’s own brother drew with his 
own hand and sent to John A. Murrell by a safe 
messenger, when John A. Murrell was in prison. But 
the messenger could not reach John A. Murrell, so 
he gave the map to Mose’s father.” 

“What was the map?” I asked. 

“Well, Mose said it was a map to show where the 
land pirate’s treasure was hidden,” Jibby said. “He 
said John A. Murrell’s brother came up North here, 
where he would not be known, and hid the treasure. 
And this is what old Mose said: ‘Riverbank — 
that’s where all that money is hid away at. That’s 
what the map say — Riverbank.* And this is River- 
bank, isn’t it? You’d call this ‘up North,* wouldn’t 
you?” 

I was excited right away, but Skippy whittled a 
few shavings off the stick he was whittling. 

“Yes,” he said then, “but you didn’t see the map, 
did you?” 

“No,” Jibby said. 

“Well, I think it is mighty slim,” Skippy said. 

29 


JIBBY JONES 


“Most likely it is just some negro talk. If the map 
does say ‘Riverbank,’ it may mean ‘river bank’ — 
the bank of any river anywhere. And anybody 
would be foolish to send all his treasure a thousand 
miles away, to be hidden. A man wouldn’t do that; 
it don’t sound reasonable. You might as well look 
for fish in the tops of trees as look for that pirate 
treasure anywhere around here.” 

“Or rabbits,” I said, and Skippy and Tad laughed, 
but Wampus did not laugh. 

“ Rabbits do climb trees!” Wampus said, ready to 
get mad in a minute. 

Jibby looked at Wampus in that solemn, slow way 
of his. 

“I don’t believe rabbits climb trees, Wampus,” 
Jibby said. 

We had been talking about rabbits before Jibby 
came in out of the rain, but I don’t remember what 
started us. I guess maybe I started it by saying it 
looked as if it might rain all day, and then Wampus 
said he remembered a worse rain — the one when 
we had the school picnic. Then Skippy said he had 
to laugh when he thought of how Sue Smale’s black 
straw hat sort of melted in the rain that day, and the 
black ran down her face and on her yellow hair, be¬ 
cause she had blacked the hat with shoe polish. 
Then Tad had said girls did things like that: they 
were silly. And I said, “Yes, you bet they’re silly, 
why, Sue says rabbits climb trees.” Then Wampus 
got mad and said, “Rabbits do climb trees; I know 

30 


THE CLIMBING RABBIT 

they do, because my Uncle Oscar saw one in a 
tree.” 

So now Wampus told Jibby his Uncle Oscar had 
seen a rabbit up a tree. 

“ I guess it was a squirrel,” said Jibby. “Squirrels 
climb trees; rabbits don’t.” 

“I guess my Uncle Oscar knows,” said Wampus, 
ready to get mad in a minute at anybody that said 
his Uncle Oscar did not know. “He told me, and he 
told Sue, and that’s why she said so. He was over in 
the Illinois bottom land last spring, when the river 
was high, rowing around in a skiff, and he saw a 
rabbit in a tree. It had climbed there. Uncle Oscar 
said so.” 

“I don’t want to dispute any conclusion your 
Uncle Oscar drew from the fact that a rabbit was in 
a tree, Wampus,” said Jibby Jones, “but couldn’t it 
have been a squirrel? Squirrels climb trees.” 

Tad shouted. It was too funny to see Jibby sitting 
there like a wise old owl telling us that squirrels climb 
trees. He might as well have said water was wet, we 
knew it so well. 

“Aw!” said Wampus; “I guess my uncle knows a 
rabbit from a squirrel. It was a rabbit. It was a 
regular cottontail.” 

Jibby blinked his eyes and thought this over. 

“ Perhaps it didn’t climb the tree,” he said. “ Per¬ 
haps the water had been higher and the rabbit had 
been floating on a board and hopped off the board 
into the tree, and then the water went down and left 

3i 


JIBBY JONES 


the rabbit in the tree. Then, if your uncle saw a 
rabbit high up in the tree, he might have thought it 
had climbed there.” 

“No,” said Wampus, “because the water was as 
high then as it had been; it was higher than it had 
been.” 

“Did your uncle see the rabbit climb the tree?” 
Jibby Jones asked. 

“ No, it was there when he saw it,” said Wampus. 
“It was high up in the tree; twice as high as he could 
reach from his boat. He said it was the first tree¬ 
climbing rabbit he had seen, but that he under¬ 
stood just what had happened. The river had come 
up and surrounded the rabbit and the tree, and as 
the river got higher there was no place for the 
rabbit to go but up the tree. It just had to climb, so 
it climbed. So rabbits do climb trees. Because my 
uncle doesn’t tell lies, and I can lick any two that 
say he does.” 

That seemed reasonable to me. I thought Wam¬ 
pus had proved it pretty well, and so did Tad and 
Skippy. When an uncle sees a rabbit up a tree and 
that uncle don’t lie and his nephew can lick any two 
that say he does lie, it seems a pretty sure thing that 
rabbits do climb trees. We admitted it. Tad and 
Skippy and I admitted it, but Jibby Jones was not 
that sort of admitter. 

“It may be so,” he said, “because a lot of things 
that do not seem so are so. I never thought crabs 
could climb trees until father took me to Tahiti. I 

32 


THE CLIMBING RABBIT 

saw crabs climb trees and throw down coconuts 
there.” 

“Oh, come off!” Wampus laughed. We all 
laughed. 

“But I did,” said Jibby. “They climb trees and 
pick the coconuts, and throw them down, to break 
them open. And if the coconuts don’t break open, 
they carry them up the trees again and drop them 
again, until they do break.” 

We thought he was trying to fool us, but he was as 
sober as a judge. Of course, we didn’t believe him; 
not until I asked my father and he said it was true. 
Then I had to. 

“There is also,” said Jibby, “a fish that climbs 
trees. I have never seen one, but my father has. I 
think it was in Liberia. Perhaps not. And some 
fish fly.” 

“Of course! We’ve all heard of flying fish,” said 
Wampus. “What do you think we are? Ignorant?” 

“But here,” said Jibby Jones, “fish do not fly, and 
fish do not climb trees, and crabs do not climb trees. 
And I am not so sure rabbits climb trees.” 

“You don’t mean to say my Uncle Oscar says 
what is not so, do you?” Wampus demanded, as 
mad as he could get. 

“No, Jibby,” I said, “you must not say that, be¬ 
cause Wampus’s Uncle Oscar isn’t that kind. He 
doesn’t tell lies.” 

“I wasn’t saying he did,” said Jibby. “I don’t 
know him, but I believe he tells all the truth there is. 

33 


JIBBY JONES 


I only say he saw the rabbit in the tree, but he did 
not see it climb the tree. The rabbit might have 
got into the tree some other way.” 

“How, Td like to know?” Wampus demanded. 

“I don’t know,” said Jibby. “I wasn’t there. I 
only mean to say things sometimes seem to be so 
when they are not so. If there was such a tree as one 
that grows up in a night, and if that was a tree of 
that kind, the rabbit might have stepped on it with¬ 
out thinking it was that sort of tree. Then the 
tree might have shot up in a hurry, with the rabbit 
in its top. Then anybody, seeing the rabbit in the 
top of the tree, would naturally think it had climbed 
the tree.” 

“There are no such trees,” said Wampus. “Trees 
don’t grow in a night.” 

“And if there were such trees,” Skippy said, “it 
would not prove anything. If the rabbit stepped 
on a limb one inch from the ground that limb would 
still be one inch from the ground when the tree was 
a hundred feet high. Tree limbs don’t slide up the 
tree like that. If you hang a horseshoe on a limb 
five feet high to-day, and nobody touches it, it will 
be on the same limb and only five feet high a hun¬ 
dred years from now.” 

Of course, this was true and we all agreed with 
Skippy, and got to talking about trees and why so 
many have limbs only high up. It is because the 
tender little first limbs die and break off. They get 
too much shade or animals eat them or something. 

34 


THE CLIMBING RABBIT 


Then we got to talking of what animals eat, and 
about caribou and elk, and about one thing and 
another, and we forgot all about rabbits. 

About half an hour later, Orpheus Cadwallader 
came along in his rubber coat and rubber boots. He 
is the man that is watchman on the island and he is 
plump and pleasant and can tell some great stories 
of the river. We tried to coax him to come under 
with us and talk, but he said he had a trot-line he 
wanted to run and couldn’t stop. He said the rain 
was about over; that it would be sunny in an hour. 
And it was. Somebody suggested that we go fishing, 
and we went. 


CHAPTER IV 

DO FISH CLIMB TREES? 

In the summer, when we are up there on Birch Is¬ 
land, we fish in quite a few places and in quite a few 
ways, but we don’t do much fishing on our own is¬ 
land; it is about as poor a place as there is in the 
whole Mississippi River. Once in a while, though, 
we do go across the island to where the slough is, and 
try it. If the river is high enough, and not too 
muddy, we catch a few fish there, and sometimes we 
try it because it is so near — only a few hundred 
feet from the back doors of our cottages. So, this 
day, we got our cans of worms and our fishpoles 
and went back through the woods and weeds and 
nettles to see how the fishing was there. 

All our cottages set on the bank of the “chute” 
or what is now the main channel of the river, but 
Orph Cadwallader’s cottage sets back a couple of 
hundred feet or so, because he is the caretaker, and 
we went to the part of the slough back of Orpheus 
Cadwallader’s cottage because we thought the fish¬ 
ing would be best there, but when we got there it 
looked pretty bad. Along the edges of the slough 
the weeds had grown tall and thick and beyond 
them was nothing but mud — just soft, slushy mud, 
slanting down to the water of the slough like the 
edge of a dinner plate. 


36 


DO FISH CLIMB TREES? 


We tried to throw our lines far enough out to 
get to water deep enough to have fish in it, but it 
couldn’t be done — the lines would not reach. We 
tried putting some driftwood on top of the slush 
mud, to walk out on, but that was no good either. 
When we put a foot on a stick of driftwood, it went 
right down in the mud, as if there was no bottom. 

“Aw, come on!” Wampus said. “This is no good. 
If there are any big carp in there they can stay there, 
for all I care. We can’t get out to where they are, 
and they can’t come in to us. Let’s go home.” 

We all thought the same. But Jibby Jones stood 
still. 

“Wait a minute!” he said. “When I was in the 
North Woods with father, I saw them catching fish 
through the ice with saplings.” 

“Ice!” Wampus shouted. “Ice! I’d like to see 
some ice! There’s not much ice around here that I 
can see.” 

“And a sapling wouldn’t reach as far as our fish- 
poles do,” said Tad. 

“You don’t understand,” said Jibby. “What I 
mean to say is that they bent the saplings down and 
tied their lines on the tips of them. Then they set 
the saplings with a sort of trigger, so that when the 
fish bit at the bait the sapling sprung up and pulled 
the fish out.” 

“ Come on; let’s get home!’’ said Wampus. “The 
mosquitoes are eating me alive.” 

But Jibby aimed his nose toward a tall, thin elm 

37 


JIBBY JONES 

sapling near the edge of the weeds and followed his 
nose. 

“This tree will do,” he said, and he took hold of 
it as high as he could reach and threw his weight 
on it. But his weight was not enough to bend it 
down. 

“Come on, you fellows, and help,” he said; “per¬ 
haps we will catch a good fish.” 

We laughed, but we all took hold of the tree. We 
began to bend it toward the slough. 

“No, please!” Jibby said. “Not that way. Bend 
it in the other direction. Bend it along the shore. 
We have to bait it first.” 

So we shifted to another side of the elm and bent 
it down. We held it down, with the top touching the 
ground. Jibby looked at it doubtfully. 

“It is too bad it isn’t nearer the slough,” he said; 
and then he said: “I’ve got it!” 

He got the longest of our fishpoles and tied it to 
the top of the tree. 

“That will give just that much more length,” he 
said, and then he baited the hook with the nicest lot 
of worms you ever saw and set the bobber at what 
he thought was about the right height and told us to 
ease up on the tree. 

We eased up until the end of the tree was about 
twenty feet from the ground, and then Jibby told us 
to swing it around, out over the slough, and we did 
it. We lowered away until the bait was in the water 
and the bobber floated. They were out in the deeper 

38 


DO FISH CLIMB TREES? 


water, where fish ought to be if there were any. We 
tried to hold the tree steady, but it wabbled a good 
deal, and Jibby got a sound piece of driftwood and 
propped it under the tree. 

“Now,” he said, “you can all sit on the tree and 
hold it down. I’m sorry we haven’t an automatic 
trigger to hold it, but we haven’t had time to make 
one. Perhaps this will do as well. You sit on the 
tree and I will watch the bobber, and when we get 
a bite I’ll say ‘Jump!’ then everybody jump lively, 
and we’ll have our fish.” 

So we sat there and nothing happened. 

And we sat there longer and nothing happened. 

“There are no two ways about it,” Wampus said, 
“this is the craziest idea I ever heard of. Nobody 
but Jibby Jones would ever think of anything like 
this. Four boys and a complete tree, and a fish-pole, 
and Jibby Jones, all trying to catch one fish. We 
won’t catch a fish. But if we do catch a fish, you 
know what kind it will be — it will be a mud-cat as 
big as your little finger or a perch as big as your 
thumb.” 

“Or a minnow, maybe,” said Skippy. 

‘‘Surely! A minnow,” I said. “ Using a whole elm 
tree to catch a minnow!” 

“We could sit here a hundred years,” said Wam¬ 
pus, “and we wouldn’t catch anything.” 

Jibby did not hear us. He was keeping his eagle 
eye on the bobber. 

“ I think we had a nibble just then,” he said now. 

39 


JIBBY JONES 

“You fellows want to be ready to jump when I say 
‘jump.’ ” 

“We’ll be ready,” Wampus said. “Don’t worry, 
Jibby; we’ll be ready, in about one hundred years. 
If anybody can catch a fish this way, I 11 

“Jump! Jump! Oh, jump!” Jibby Jones shouted 
just then, waving his hands and jumping himself for 
all he was worth. 

I don’t know whether we all jumped at once or 
not. All I know is that I got off the tree and it 
whacked me in the back of the head as it went on up 
and all four of us were on our backs in the weeds just 
in time to see the biggest carp I ever saw go sailing 
up into the air like a shot out of a cannon. I’ll bet 
the carp was the most surprised fish in the Missis¬ 
sippi Valley right then. There wasn’t any playing 
with him, as an angler does; one moment he was 
wondering where that nice bunch of worm bait came 
from and the next moment he was yanked out of the 
slough at about sixty miles an hour as that tree 
snapped up like a whip. There was enough strength 
in that tree to pull an ox out of the water, almost, 
and it spent it all on that one carp and all in one 
second, too. 

“Whoop!” was all Wampus had time to say, and 
then the tree and the pole at the top of it did what 
any tree and pole would have done in the same cir¬ 
cumstances. They snapped that carp off the hook 
like a giant throwing a mud ball from the end of a 
switch. We saw the carp sail up and up, twice as 

40 


DO FISH CLIMB TREES? 


high as the tree itself and come down and down, in¬ 
land from the slough. 

I scrambled to my feet and Tad and Wampus and 
Skippy scrambled to their feet, and we made a rapid 
break for the direction the carp had taken. 

“Stop! Listen! Hear where it falls!” Jibby 
Jones shouted, but we were too excited for that. We 
rushed into the woods and began beating through 
the weeds and nettles and looking up into the trees, 
and Jibby had to join us. We hunted for an hour, I 
guess, and then we gave it up. It was time to go 
home, anyway. 

We went back to the slough to get our poles and 
things, and we got them and started home. The 
first house we came to was Wampus’s, because 
that is nearest to Orpheus Cadwallader’s cottage, 
which we had been almost back of, and when we 
got there Mr. and Mrs. Smale and Sue Smale were 
on the little front porch and Orpheus Cadwallader 
was standing at the foot of the porch steps with one 
foot on the bottom step and the biggest carp I ever 
saw was in his hands. It was a beauty. 

“Y-e-s, M-i-s-t-e-r S-m-a-l-e,” he was drawling 
in that slow, lazy way of his, “1 always did think a 
carp was more of a land animal than most fish, and 
now I know it. This proves it. I’ve often seen carp 
wiggle across sand bars on their bellies, and I’ve 
often said I was sure they came up to my garden 
at night and ate the young vegetable tops, but now 
I know more than that. They climb trees, and 

4i 


JIBBY JONES 


I know they climb trees because this carp was in 
the maple alongside of my house, sitting in a crotch 
of a branch, eating maple leaves. There are some in 
its mouth now.” 

Sure enough, he showed us that there were leaves 
in the carp’s mouth. 

“ But that doesn’t quite prove it climbs trees, does 
it?” asked Mr. Smale. “It might have got in the 
tree in some other way.” 

“How could a carp get in a tree except by climb¬ 
ing it? ” Orpheus Cadwallader drawled. “ Of course, 
you needn’t believe me, if you don’t want to, but 
I’ll believe carps climb trees as long as I live.” 

We knew, of course, that that carp had not 
climbed a tree. We knew exactly how it had got into 
that tree — our fishing tree had slung the carp so 
high in the air that it had alighted in the top of the 
maple tree. I nudged Wampus and grinned. 

It was then Jibby Jones turned to us and spoke. 

“Rabbits,” he said, and then repeated it: “Rab¬ 
bits, and carp, may climb trees, but you cannot be 
sure rabbits and carp do climb trees just because you 
happen to find rabbits and carp in trees.” 

Orpheus Cadwallader turned and looked at 
Jibby. 

“Rabbits, hey?” he said. “I don’t know about 
rabbits. I never saw a rabbit climb a tree, and I 
never saw a rabbit in a tree, so I say nothing about 
rabbits. But I do know about carp. I know carp 
can climb trees, because I saw this carp in the tree, 

42 


DO FISH CLIMB TREES? 


and it was still alive and kicking. I saw that with 
my own eyes. And if the carp did not climb that 
tree, how did it get up that tree?” 

“Maybe it leaped from the water to the tree,” 
said Jibby. 

“Foolishness! Nonsense!” Orpheus Cadwallader 
said. “I know better than that. A carp can’t leap 
that far.” 

But we knew better, because that was just 
what that carp had done. It had made one jump 
from the slough to the tree. But had we helped it 
a little. 

So Orph went waddling home with his tree-climb¬ 
ing carp, pretty mad because nobody would be¬ 
lieve it had climbed the tree, but Jibby stood look¬ 
ing after him. When Orph had gone out of sight, 
Jibby turned to Skippy. 

“Skippy,” he drawled, with a twinkle in his eyes 
that sometimes came there, “you don’t want to hunt 
for pirate’s treasure, do you? A little while ago you 
said we might as well look for fish in the tops of 
trees as for pirate’s treasure around here. I don’t 
say there is pirate’s treasure everywhere around 
here, but there does seem to be a fish in the top of a 
tree now and then.” 

Skippy grinned. 

“All right!” he said. “Tell us about the land 
pirate again, Jibby. Anybody that can throw a carp 
into a tree-top has a right to believe in a land pirate’s 
treasure being a thousand miles from where he got it.” 

43 


CHAPTER V 
THE FISHING PRIZE 


That night, before we went to bed, the five of us sat 
on the riprap rocks in front of the cottages, and 
Jibby told all he knew about the land pirate and his 
treasure again, and we got up the Land Pirate’s 
Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company. We 
sat there and swatted mosquitoes and talked like 
good friends and Dutch uncles, and swore a cross- 
my-heart and hope-to-die oath to be faithful and 
true to the constitution and by-laws of the Land 
Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Com¬ 
pany. There wasn’t any constitution or any by¬ 
laws, but that did not matter — we swore to be 
true to them, anyhow, and maybe, sometime when 
we had time, we might get up some, if we thought 
we needed them. 

But, when we had talked it all over and had come 
right down to facts, the only thing about the treas¬ 
ure that Jibby seemed to be real sure of was that the 
old negro Mose had been awful dead earnest. That 
old negro had been mortal sure there was treasure 
somewhere. He would have bet a million dollars on 
it. And that was what made Jibby think there must 
be some treasure hidden somewhere. There was no 
doubt that there had been a land pirate named John 
A. Murrell. 


44 


THE FISHING PRIZE 


Talking it over together that way, we asked 
Jibby a million or two questions, and it came out 
that the old negro Mose had said that “ Riverbank” 
was the key to where the treasure was hidden. There 
was no “Riverbank” on the map side of the map, 
but on the back of it the one word “ Riverbank ” was 
written, old Mose had said, and old Mose said his 
father had said that was the key. “You go whar 
Riverbank is, up the river whar black folks is free,” 
was what his father had said. Of course, that was 
away back when there were slaves, and Mose was a 
slave then, and so was his father. 

The other thing Jibby had to go on was the pine 
tree — the signal pine that every friend of John A. 
Murrell and his pirates set out in the corner of the 
lot or yard or farm. The thing to do, Jibby said, 
was to find a lone pine tree, because that would be a 
sign and a signal and a symbol and a sort of trade¬ 
mark, showing that place had something to do with 
John A. Murrell. We tried to think of lone pines, 
but, just offhand, we couldn’t think of any that 
night. All we knew were planted in rows. 

So there did not seem to be much to do but elect 
Wampus the Captain of the Land Pirate’s Treasure- 
Hunting and Exploration Company, and go to bed. 
We thought we would go up and down the river 
when we had time, and explore back into the coun¬ 
try here and there, and look for lone pines, and, if we 
found one in the corner of a lot or farm, we would 
look for a likely treasure-hiding place. 

45 


JIBBY JONES 


Early the next morning, Parcell, who runs the 
boathouse down at town, came up with my sister 
May and a load of groceries and meat for every¬ 
body, and he brought my dog along. My dog is one 
of the bulliest dogs you ever saw, but along about 
April that year all the hair came off his back, and 
mother said he was an awful sight, so we let a man 
take him, to grow his hair back on. The man was a 
horse doctor and good at making hairless dogs hairy 
again, and he had fixed Rover up fine. And now he 
had sent him back. 

I was tickled to see Rover again, and he was 
tickled to see me, and I guess my mother was almost 
as glad, because some pretty tough customers live in 
houseboats on the river, sometimes. Most of the 
houseboaters are all right, and are kind and nice, but 
some mean ones come floating down the river, and 
you can never tell what they’ll do. So a dog comes 
in handy, especially a good-sized dog like Rover. 

The only thing I was sorry about was that Rover 
had come this particular day, because the next day 
I would have to tie him up and leave him at home, 
because it was the day of the Uncle Oscar Fishing 
Prize. You can’t have a dog along when you are 
fishing from a skiff for a prize. And Uncle Oscar’s 
Fishing Prize was one of the most important things 
of the whole summer, always. 

The way of the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize was 
this: Every year, as long as we had been going up to 
the island, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar had given 

46 


THE FISHING PRIZE 


a prize to the fellow who made the best fishing 
record on a certain day, and that day was Uncle 
Oscar’s birthday. That was why we fished for the 
prize on that day, and not on another day. 

This Uncle Oscar just lived and breathed on the 
river, as you might say, and loved it, and he thought 
nobody fished enough or boated enough or swam 
enough or loved the big old river enough. That was 
the way he was. He almost wept when he told about 
the old days when the river was full of fish and the 
big old packets and logging steamers were as thick 
as mosquitoes, and great long log rafts used to float 
down with huts built on them, and camp-fires, and 
men pushing the long sweeps to steer them. 

That was why, every year, he offered the fishing 
prize, but we boys got so we didn’t take much in¬ 
terest in it. 

“He just gives it so Wampus can win it,” Skippy 
Root said to me this year. “He knows Wampus is 
the best fisher, and he knows Wampus is sure to win 
it.” 

“Well,” I said, “ain’t you going to try for it? 
Fishing is luck, and sometime Wampus’s luck is 
going to go back on him.” 

“Sure, I’m going to try,” Skippy said. “I’m 
going to try, but not because I’ve got a chance to 
win. I’m going to try because Uncle Oscar Smale is 
a bully fellow and he’d feel bad if we didn’t let on 
we were trying to win the prize he gives. But Wam¬ 
pus will win it, like he always does.” 

47 


JIBBY JONES 


I thought so, too, and so did Tad Willing. Wam¬ 
pus always won. But, when we saw the prize Wam¬ 
pus’s Uncle Oscar offered this year, we did wish we 
had a chance. It was a jointed fishing-rod, with a 
five-dollar reel, and it was a beauty. 

So, a week or so before Uncle Oscar’s birthday, 
we were squatting on the shore of the river talking 
about things, and Jibby Jones came along and sat 
down beside us. We were talking about crawfish 
holes and where bees had their bee trees with the 
honey in them and all sorts of things, just as we hap¬ 
pened to think of them. There was a yellow-jacket 
bee on a flower just in front of us, getting honey, and 
Skippy said he wished he knew where that bee’s bee 
tree was. 

Jibby Jones leaned over until his big nose almost 
touched the bee. 

“ I can’t tell by this bee,” he said, “but by and by 
there will be a bee come along and I can tell you.” 

Pretty soon the bee flew up and circled and went 
down and lit on a rock and walked around. Then it 
flew out over the river and back and zigzagged off. 
Then two or three other bees tried the flower for 
honey, and each time Jibby Jones put his nose close 
to it and said, “No; not this one.” After a while a 
bee lit on the flower that seemed to satisfy Jibby. 

“Now I can tell you,” he said. “You watch this 
bee when it flies away.” 

So we did. When it got enough honey, it flew into 
the air and made a bee-line off for somewhere. 

48 


THE FISHING PRIZE 

Jibby pulled a pocket compass out of his pants 
pocket. 

“A bit west of south-west-by-west,” he said. 
“Any time you want to find that bee tree you start 
from here and go just west of south-west-by-west 
and you’ll find it. That bee was going home.” 

“ How did you know that one was going home and 
the others were not? ” Wampus asked. “Was that a 
pilot bee?” 

“Maybe it was,” said Jibby. 

“Well, how did you know it was a pilot bee, 
then?” asked Skippy. 

“Maybe I could smell the difference,” Jibby 
said. “I’ve got a lot of nose; it ought to be good for 
something.” 

So we all laughed, but we didn’t know whether 
Jibby was fooling or in earnest. That was the way 
he was. Sometimes he fooled just for the fun of it, 
and sometimes he was in earnest. We could never 
quite make out which he was, but we had found 
out one thing — if we waited long enough and didn’t 
keep joshing him too much, he always ended up by 
telling us what the truth was. So now Wampus sort 
of laughed. 

“Aw, quit!” he said. “You can’t smell like that; 
you can’t smell the difference between one kind of 
bee and another kind. Nobody can; I never heard 
such nonsense. I bet even my Uncle Oscar can’t, and 
he knows just about everything.” 

“Has he got a nose like mine?” Jibby asked. 

49 


JIBBY JONES 


Well, Wampus couldn’t say he had, because no¬ 
body we knew had a nose like Jibby. There were no 
other noses like it. It was the biggest and thinnest 
nose anybody ever saw. 

“No,” Wampus said, “Uncle Oscar’s nose is just 
a common nose.” 

“And does he exercise it regular?” Jibby asked. 

“What do you mean by * exercise it regular’?” 
Wampus asked. 

“Why, exercise it right along,” said Jibby. “Like 
you exercise your arms and legs if you want to make 
them good for what they are good for. Or like you 
would exercise your eyes if you wanted them to be 
good at seeing things. Or your ears if you wanted 
them to be ’cute at hearing things. You know you 
can do that, don’t you?” 

“How?” asked Skippy. 

“Well, the Indians did it,” said Jibby. “They be¬ 
gan when they were young, and they exercised their 
ears and their eyes, and soon they could hear the 
grass grow and see a hair as far as you can see a fish- 
pole. You can exercise your nose the same way, 
can’t you?” 

“Well, it sounds sort of reasonable,” said Tad 
Willing. 

“Of course, it sounds reasonable,” Jibby said, as 
pleasant as could be. “Can you do this?” 

He put his thumb against the side of his nose and 
pushed it until most of his nose lay flat against his 
left cheek; then he put his thumb on the other side of 

50 


THE FISHING PRIZE 


his nose and pushed until his nose lay flat against 
his right cheek. We all tried it, but we couldn’t do 
it. Wampus was the worst at it, because his nose is a 
pug and sticks up. 

“You don’t exercise your noses, that’s why,” 
Jibby said. “ I don’t blame you. It is no business of 
mine what you do with your noses. But I exercise 
mine and keep it limber and flexible. I get up every 
morning and push my nose all around my face, to 
keep it keen and lively. It would be mighty danger¬ 
ous for me if I ever let my nose get stiff and hard.” 

“Why would it?” Skippy wanted to know. 

“Because it’s my jib sail,” Jibby said, as solemn 
as an owl. “ If I got out in a big wind sometime, say 
near the edge of a big precipice, and the wind caught 
my nose, it might blow me over and dash me to 
pieces on the rocks below. I’ve got to watch out for 
that, with a nose like mine. I ’ve got to keep my nose 
limber, so that if a big wind comes up I can furl my 
jib, or jibe it to port or starboard, to steer me away 
from the precipice.” 

We didn’t say anything. We just looked at one 
another. 

v 

“I might be out in Arizona, or somewhere else, 
where the wind blows hard for months at a time,” 
Jibby went on, just as solemn as before, “and a nose 
like mine would be a nuisance. The wind would 
catch it on one side and whirl me around one way, 
and then it would catch it on the other side and 
whirl me around the other way, and I’d never be 

5i 


JIBBY JONES 


able to get anywhere if I didn’t keep my nose 
soft and flexible, so I could lay it back against my 
face and fasten it there with a strip of adhesive 

plaster.” 

“Oh, boy!” Skippy said then, because that was 
almost too much. 

“But,” Jibby went on, “you fellows don’t need to 
exercise your noses that way because they don t 
amount to much as jibs, anyway.” 

‘Til say mine don’t,” said Wampus, touching his 

pug. 

“No,” said Jibby seriously. “I’ve often felt 
sorry for you, Wampus; having a stub like that. 
But it’s a good nose for smelling with, if you train it 
right. It ought to be a quick smeller — a lot quicker 
than mine — because it is so short. Smells ought to 
get in quicker. The only trouble is that you don’t 
any of you know how to smell.” 

“You don’t have to know how to smell things,” 
said Tad. “You just smell them, and that’s all there 
is to it; you can’t help smelling them.” 

“Did you ever read James Latimer’s book called 
1 Odors and How to Improve the Sense of Smell’?” 
Jibby asked. 

“No,” we all said. 

“ Neither did I,” said Jibby. “ I never even heard 
of it, because there isn’t any such book, but there 
might be. Maybe I’ll write one myself, sometime. 
The trouble with you fellows is that you don’t think 
about your noses. I do think about mine; I think a 

52 


THE FISHING PRIZE 


lot about it. I can’t help thinking about it, there’s 
such a lot of it.” 

That was true, anyway. 

“You fellows just go around smelling what hap¬ 
pens to come to you to be smelled,” Jibby went on. 
“You can tell a violet from a fish by the smell of it, 
maybe, but you don’t exercise your smelling appa¬ 
ratus. Can you tell the difference between a channel 
catfish and a mud catfish when they are down under 
the water ten feet or so?” 

“No, and nobody can. Nobody can even smell a 
fish when it is under water,” said Wampus. “Can 
you?” 

“No matter!” said Jibby, sort of tossing his head. 
“What I say is that, if people trained their noses and 
exercised their smelling powers properly, they might 
smell smells that they don’t even imagine they can 
smell now. That stands to reason. There are dozens 
of kinds of violets, but the most that most people 
can tell when they smell a violet is that it is a violet. 
A botanist, that has trained his nose to smell violets 
and knows there are dozens of different kinds of 
violets, gets so, after a while, he can tell most of them 
from the others just by the smell. And it is that way 
with everything.” 

“Well, what good does it do?” asked Skippy. 

“Everything you know does some good,” said 
Jibby. “That’s what knowing things is for, to do us 
good. It is just the ‘ little bit more ’ that makes any¬ 
thing the ‘most’ instead of leaving it the ‘least.’” 

53 


JIBBY JONES 


“I guess that’s so,” I said. “It’s partly because 
Wampus knows a little bit more about fishing than 
we do that he wins the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize 
every year.” 

“You mean he can smell the fish when they are 
under water?” Jibby asked. 

“Pshaw, no!” said Skippy. “That’s nonsense.” 

“Is it?” Jibby asked, grinning a little. 

“Well, if it isn’t,” said Skippy, “why don’t you 
go in for the Uncle Oscar Prize this year? ” 

“Oh, I oughtn’t to do that,” Jibby said. “It 
wouldn’t be fair. What if I could smell the fish when 
they are under water? I’d know where all the fish 
were and you fellows that belong on the island here 
wouldn’t have a chance. No, I’d better not compete 
for that prize; I’d win it sure.” 


CHAPTER VI 
THE PRIZE-WINNER 


Well, we all laughed! It was a little too ridiculous, 
the solemn way in which Jibby said he would be sure 
to win the prize. We had all tried to win the prize, 
and we knew no one but Wampus could win it; 
he was just a natural-born fisher and couldn’t be 
beat. 

“Oh, very well, then,” Jibby said, pretending to 
be offended. “Just for that I will try to win it, and 
I will win it. I’m sorry to take it away from Wam¬ 
pus, but I’ll have to do it.” 

We all laughed again. 

“I suppose,” Tad said to Jibby, “you’ll go right 
home and give your nose some extra exercise now, 
won’t you?” 

“Well, if you see me doing queer things with the 
old jib, don’t be surprised,” Jibby said. 

The next few days, though, we certainly began to 
be worried and to think there might be something 
in what Jibby had more than hinted to us. He did 
some mighty queer things, and we watched him do 
them. He would stand with his nose in the air and 
sniff. He would stand with his nose up and sniff 
four or five times, and then turn his head just an 
inch and sniff four or five times more, and then turn 
his head again and sniff again, and so on. Some- 

55 


JIBBY JONES 


times he would pull a blade of grass and sniff at one 
end of it and then turn it around and sniff at the 
other end, and keep this up five minutes at a time. 

Then he began sniffing the old Mississippi River. 
He would lie in a skiff with his head over the edge 
and his nose close to the water and sniff. Then he 
would get on the seat and row a distance and lie 
down and sniff again. A few minutes later, we 
caught him with fish scales, sniffing them one after 
another — a bass scale and a perch scale and a piece 
of channel catfish skin and a piece of mud catfish 
tail, and so on. Then, while we watched him, he put 
them one at a time in a pail of water, and sniffed at 
the water. He kept changing them in the water, 
first one and then the other, and he sniffed each 
time. It seemed plain enough to us that he was 
giving his nose some good exercise. 

About eleven o’clock, on the fishing-prize day, 
Wampus’s Uncle Oscar came up to the island. He 
brought the jointed fishing-rod and the reel with 
him, so we could see what the prize was going to be, 
and I got him off alone and asked him what he 
thought about noses. I asked him if he thought 
Jibby Jones could really smell fish when they were 
under water, and if a person could exercise a nose 
and get it so it could smell things other noses could 
not smell. 

‘‘Why, yes, George,” he said slowly. “I do think 
a nose can be trained quite a little if a person goes 
about it right. That stands to reason. But I don’t 

56 


THE PRIZE-WINNER 


t&kd any stock in this idea that a person can smell 
fish under water. Does Jibby say he can?” 

“Well, no,” I had to admit. “He hasn’t said so 
out and out; he just hinted it, as you might say. I’ll 
tell you one thing, though: he’s got Wampus 
frightened. And there was the way he smelled that 
bee and knew it was the pilot bee.” 

“What’s that?” Uncle Oscar asked. “Tell me 
about that.” 

When I had told him, he laughed. 

“You boys want to look out for your Jibby 
Jones,” he said. “ He’s a bright one. He may look a 
little queer, but some of the brightest men in the 
world have been the queerest lookers; their looks 
were out of a rut and their brains were out of a rut, 
too. Tell me one thing, George; can Jibby see as 
well as he says he can smell?” 

“No, of course not,” I said. “I mean, he sees 
things we don’t take the trouble to see, sometimes, 
but his eyes can’t see very far. That is why he has 
to wear glasses. He’s near-sighted.” 

“Has to poke his nose pretty close into things to 
see them?” said Uncle Oscar. “ If he wanted to see 
exactly how a bee looked, for instance, he would 
have to poke his nose almost into a bee, would he?” 

“Yes, that’s so,” I said. 

“Well, you notice this the next time you look at a 
bee,” said Uncle Oscar. “The part of a bee back of 
its wings — its abdomen — is striped. When a bee 
goes out for honey, it goes for two things — a square 

57 


JIBBY JONES 


meal for itself and some honey or some pollen to take 
back to the hive. A bee is greedy, too; it stuffs it¬ 
self while the chance is good. If you watch a bee, 
you’ll see that the longer it feeds, the bigger and 
longer its abdomen gets. Especially longer. As it 
fills up, the stripes get farther apart. That’s how 
Jibby ‘smelled ’ that bee, George. He poked his nose 
close to it so his eyes could see it, and he saw that its 
abdomen was swelled and stretched as much as it 
could be. That meant that the bee was ready to call 
it a day’s work and go back to the hive. So your 
Jibby knew that when the bee left the flower it 
would probably make a ‘ bee-line ’ for home. And he 
was right. That’s how he ‘smelled’ that ‘pilot’ 
bee. It wasn’t a pilot bee, and he didn’t smell it. So 
you and Wampus want to look out for Jibby Jones. 
This bee business makes me think he’s going to win 
the prize, or thinks he is. He’s a mighty smart 
boy.” 

The next time I saw Jibby, which was about half 
an hour after that, I asked him: 

“Well, how’s the old smeller getting along, Jibby? 
Is it going to win the prize?” 

“ I’ll tell you, George,” Jibby said, “ I have hopes. 
I don’t say I’ll win, but I’m trying.” 

“ It will be an awful thing if it is windy this after¬ 
noon and you have to adhesive your nose shut 
against your cheek, won’t it?” I laughed. 

Jibby put his finger to his nose and wiggled his 
nose at me, and then we both laughed. 

58 


THE PRIZE-WINNER 

“I know how you smelled the pilot bee, Jibby,” 
I told him. 

“ Do you? ” he said, and it did not seem to bother 
him at all. “ J ust see if you and Wampus can see how 
I smell out-the best and biggest fish this afternoon.” 

The afternoon turned out to be the best sort for 
fishing. It was cloudy, but not too cloudy, and a 
nice riffle on the water, but not too rough. The 
place Wampus’s Uncle Oscar picked out for the con¬ 
test was the slough at the upper end of our island, 
and that meant we would have to fish from skiffs, 
which is about the best way, anyhow. 

There was not much of a gathering to see the con¬ 
test. You can’t get mothers to be very interested in 
such things, except to say, “ Oh, how nice! ” or, “ Oh, 
I’m sorry!” after it is all over, and our fathers — 
all except Jibby’s — went down to town every day 
to work. So the audience was just Wampus’s Uncle 
Oscar and Jibby’s father. They walked up to the 
slough together while we were rowing up, and they 
sat on the bank and watched us fish. We each had 
a skiff. 

When we got to the slough, Jibby was ahead, and 
he ran his skiff ashore and waited for us. 

“I’m a butter-in at this game,” he said, “so you 
fellows go ahead and pick out your places first, and 
then I’ll take mine. ,, 

I suppose we ought to have let Jibby have first 
choice, but we didn’t think of it. Wampus rowed to 
the place he liked best and let down his anchor rock, 

59 



JIBBY JONES 


and then the rest of us got as close to him as Uncle 
Oscar’s rules allowed. One boat-length away from 
each other was the rule. The other rules were that 
every fish counted. The one of us that got the most 
fish, no matter what size, scored twenty-five. The 
one that got the one biggest fish scored another 
twenty-five. The one that got the biggest weight of 
fish, after they were cleaned and ready to cook, 
scored fifty. That made the most that could be 
scored one hundred. We were to fish from one o’clock 
until five o’clock that afternoon, and we all had 
lunch — sandwiches and apples and bananas and 
water — so we could eat whenever we wanted to. 
The only other rule was that it was all worm fishing; 
we had to use worms for bait. 

As soon as Wampus got his boat settled, he baited 
up and put his line over, and we all hustled up and 
did the same thing. In a minute, almost, Wampus 
shouted: 

“First fish!” 

He had it, too. It was a good channel catfish, and 
when he unhooked it he held it up and shouted: 

“Oh, you Jibby! Come on with your fishing!” 

Jibby hadn’t rowed out from the shore yet. Now 
he backed his skiff out carefully and leaned over 
while he rowed with one oar, and sniffed at the water 
over the side of the boat. He rowed here and he 
rowed there, and then, all of a sudden, he backed 
water and plumped his rock overboard and an¬ 
chored. He was about twenty-five feet from us. 

60 


THE PRIZE-WINNER 


“Well,” Wampus said, “maybe he didn't smell 
fish there, but he picked out a good place. I 
thought some of fishing there myself.” 

Jibby took his time. He shortened up the rope to 
his rock anchor, and he looked to see that his fish- 
pole and line and hook were just as he wished them 
to be, and he took out a pocket rule and measured 
how deep his bobber was set, as if it had to be just 
right to a part of an inch. Then he put his line over 
very carefully and — whang! — the bobber went 
under like a flash. 

“Jibby’s got one!” I shouted. 

“Shut up!” Wampus said, sort of cross. “We 
can’t catch anything if you yell all the time.” So we 
kept quiet and watched Jibby and our own bobbers. 
He had a perch, and it was a big one, almost three 
pounds. Wampus opened his eyes some when he 
saw it, because a three-pound perch is a good-sized 
fish and might be good for twenty-five points if no¬ 
body got a bigger one. Just then Skippy pulled in a 
mud catfish about as big as his hand, so we all got 
busy fishing as hard as we knew how. 

It was lovely up there in the slough. The big 
elms and maples hung over and were draped with 
vines, and some sweet flower was making the air 
sweet. There were a few mosquitoes, but we did not 
mind them much; we were used to them. Jibby’s 
father and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar sat on the bank 
and smoked and watched. 

Well, in an hour or so Wampus was away ahead of 

61 


JIBBY JONES 


Tad and Skippy and me, like he always was at fish¬ 
ing, but he was fishing hard and changing his bob¬ 
ber every few minutes, because Jibby Jones was 
three fish ahead of him. 

“I guess he’s got a real nose for fish,” Wampus 
whispered to us. “ He’s smelled out the best fishing- 
hole in this whole slough; that’s what he has. I wish 
I had gone there instead of here. I’m a better fisher¬ 
man than he is, and I know it and you know it, and 
if he beats me it will just be his nose that does it.” 

“Then I wish I had his kind of nose,” I said, for I 
was so far behind that I knew I could never catch up 
unless I caught a whale. 

Just then a school of small perch must have come 
by, for Wampus caught four in succession. That 
cheered him up, but not for long, because Jibby kept 
right on catching. Now and then Jibby would pull a 
paper from his pocket and look at it, and take his 
pocket rule from his pocket and set his bobber differ¬ 
ent, and catch another fish. 

By three o’clock in the afternoon the sun was 
pretty hot, and even Wampus said the fish had 
stopped biting right, but old Jibby kept right on 
pulling one out now and then. When one side of his 
boat didn’t give him any fish, he would try the other 
side, but first he always sniffed to see if the fish were 
down there. So, after Wampus had not caught any 
for about half an hour, he tried smelling for fish, too. 
He leaned over and sniffed at the water. 

“Can’t smell a thing,” he said. 

62 



I GUESS HE’S GOT A REAL NOSE FOR FISH 








THE PRIZE-WINNER 


The funny thing was that, right along through the 
heat of the afternoon, when fishing is the worst, 
Jibby kept on pulling in a fish every now and then. 
He hadn’t caught so many more than Wampus when 
the fish were biting easy, but he had kept up with 
him, and now, that they were not biting for Wam¬ 
pus, Jibby forged right ahead. 

There s no use talking, fellows,” Wampus said. 
“I’m convinced. Jibby can smell out the fish. He 
smelled out the best fishing-hole on this whole slough, 
and that’s all there is to it. I’ve got a chance yet, 
but I do wish I had a can of nice fresh lively worms.” 

“ Yours most all gone?” Skippy asked. 

“No,” Wampus told him, “but they’re mighty 
withered, what I’ve got left. If I was a fish, I’d be 
ashamed to tackle such sick-looking worms.” 

Just about then the fish began biting again, but it 
looked as if they had got together and decided to 
help Jibby beat Wampus. Old Jibby just pulled 
them in as fast as he could take them off his hook, 
and just before five o’clock he got something on his 
line that acted like a ton of brick. It was only a carp, 
but it was a ten-pound one, and Jibby was mighty 
careful, and got it into the boat. 

“Aw, what’s the use!” Wampus said. “He’s got 
these fish trained.” 

Then Uncle Oscar, over on die bank, stood up and 
shouted, “Time’s up, boys!” — and we knew Jibby 
had won. We didn’t know how far he had won until 
we counted up the fish, and weighed them after they 

63 


JIBBY JONES 


were cleaned. Old Jibby had the biggest fish, and 
he had the most fish, and he had the most weight of 
cleaned fish; he had the whole one hundred points, 
and he could have thrown away twenty fish and still 
have had the hundred points. Wampus was mighty 
disgusted. 

It wasn’t until after we were home again and the 
fish had been weighed, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar 
had handed the prize rod and reel to Jibby, that he 
said to Jibby: 

“Well, son, I’ve fished on this river a good many 
years, but you’ve taught me something to-day.” 

“How to smell out fishing-holes?” Wampus 
wanted to know. 

Uncle Oscar looked at Jibby and laughed. 

“You tell them, Jibby,” he said. “Your father 
told me. Tell them how you smelled out the 
fish.” 

Jibby took his nose in his fingers and wiggled 
it. 

“About a week ago,” he said, “I happened to 
stick my old nose-jib in a book, and that was when 
I smelled out these fish. I thought perhaps I might 
want to try for the prize, and I heard that old Izaak 
Walton was a great fisherman, so I stuck my nose in 
his book and tried to smell out something. Izaak 
Walton was the father of anglers, you know, 
George.” 

“I know,” I said, pretty cheap, because I had 
lent the book to Jibby, but had never read it, be- 

64 


THE PRIZE-WINNER 


cause it was all about English fish, and not about 
Mississippi River fish. 

“Well,” Jibby said, “first, I asked Orpheus Cad- 
wallader where the best fishing-holes were, up in the 
slough here, and how deep I ought to set my bobber 
for the different fish, and he told me. I thought he 
ought to know, because he is the caretaker here and 
the best fisherman I know. That’s why I went to 
the hole I did go to. Orpheus Cadwallader told me 
it was good.” 

“That’s all right,” Skippy said, “but what did 
you smell out of that Izaak Walton book; that’s 
what we want to know.” 

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Jibby. “You know what 
I told you? I said it is just the ‘little bit more’ that 
makes anything the ‘most’? I knew I couldn’t fish 
against Wampus unless I had the ‘little bit more.’ 
So I went to the Izaak Walton book, and the only 
thing I found there that I didn’t know was scouring 
the worms.” 

“Scouring the worms! What is that?” asked 
Wampus, opening his eyes pretty wide. 

“Walton tells how, in his book,” said Jibby. 
“You dig your worms ahead of time, and put them 
in wet moss, in a box, and let them be there. Angle- 
worms eat mud, you know, and they’re full of mud. 
If you put them in wet moss, they don’t have any 
mud to eat and they get clean and bright and husky. 
They get used to being wet, too. They get brighter 
in color. They don’t drown so quick when they are 

65 


JIBBY JONES 


in the water, and they can wiggle harder and longer, 
and stay alive better, and the fish see them quicker 
and like them better.” 

“Shucks!” said Wampus. “Was that it?” 

“Sure, it was!” said Jibby. “I figured that your 
worms would wash out pale quicker than mine, and 
that by the middle of the afternoon they would be 
pretty sick worms, in a hot tin can, while mine, in a 
box of moss, would be cool and fresh and lively. And 
they were! It was as if I had live worms to fish with 
and you had dead ones.” 

“And you got that out of a book that was written 
maybe a couple of hundred years ago?” I asked 
him. 

“Sure, I did!” said Jibby. “I’ve got a nose that 
can smell common sense that far.” 

Well, that beat us! That beat Wampus, too. 

“You win!” he said. “You had us all fooled, 
Jibby. You deserve the prize. You’ve got a wonder¬ 
ful nose!” 

So that was all there was to it. We all laughed, 
and Jibby laughed, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar 
laughed. Then, all of a sudden, Wampus’s Uncle 
Oscar put his nose in the air and sniffed. 

“Um-yum!” he said. “I’ve got a fine nose, too. 
I can smell fish frying, and it certainly smells good 
to me. Can you smell it, Jibby?” 

Jibby put his nose in the air and sniffed. 

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I can smell three channel 
catfish and four perch.” 


66 


THE PRIZE-WINNER 


Then he sniffed again. 

“Two of the catfish are fried on one side, and the 
other catfish and the four perch are fried on the 
other side,” he said. 

And that’s how Jibby was; he was a dandy. He 
liked to fool, but there was always something back of 
his fooling. This time it was a fried fish supper. So 
we went to wash up and have it, for we were all eat¬ 
ing at Wampus’s house. And while Wampus was 
washing, he turned to Jibby and said: 

“Well, Jibby, if your nose can smell out things so 
extra well, why don’t you give it a little more exer¬ 
cise and then smell out that land pirate’s treasure?” 

“ Maybe I will, Wampus, if you say to. You’re the 
Captain and the orders have to come from you,” 
Jibby said. 

But none of us knew then how soon we were going 
to be a lot more excited about that land pirate’s 
treasure. 


CHAPTER VII 

THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 

Well, we all had a good time at dinner, and Wam¬ 
pus’s Uncle Oscar made a speech and gave Jibby 
Jones the rod and reel, and Jibby made us laugh by 
saying we mustn’t blame him for winning the prize, 
because it wasn’t his fault he had an extra good 
nose; he said it was his Grandfather Parmenter’s 
fault, that he had inherited the nose from. Then 
Wampus’s Uncle Oscar said that it was all right to 
say “nose,” but that the kind of “nose” Jibby used 
was brains, and that — on the river or off the river 
— the fellow that had brains and used them always 
stood the best chance of winning. 

So we ate fried fish until we couldn’t eat any more, 
and then we sat around outside until bedtime, and I 
tied Rover to one of the posts under our cottage, and 
we all went home and to bed. 

Maybe I had eaten too much fried fish. Anyway, 
I lay awake awhile and heard Orpheus Cadwallader 
waddling past the house, going his rounds to see that 
everything was all right, and I heard Rover get up 
and walk to the end of his rope and wag his tail at 
Orpheus. His tail thumped against one of the posts, 
and I knew he was wagging it. 

A little while later, Rover began to howl, and he 

68 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 


is one of the loudest howlers in the world, I guess. 
The moon was one of the things he was fondest of 
howling at; he seemed to think it was hung in the 
sky as an insult to dogs. Whenever there was a 
moon and Rover saw it, he howled. And the other 
thing that made him howl was being tied up. He 
would stand being tied up for an hour or so, because 
he expected I would come and untie him, but, if he 
was tied for much longer than an hour, he felt hurt 
and miserable and neglected, and he would begin to 

howl. He would begin with an “ Arr-oo-” and 

hang on to the “oo” until it quivered and trem¬ 
bled, and everybody within a mile wondered if it 
was ever going to stop, and got nervous, and tossed 
in bed, and swore. And then Rover would take 

another breath and begin another “Arr-oo-” 

longer and louder than ever. And keep it up all 
night, unless somebody went and untied him. 

The reason I tied Rover that night was because he 
is a wandering dog. He likes to explore. And what 
he likes to explore for is dead fish, mostly, and the 
deader the better. If you didn’t tie him up at night, 
he would wander off until he found a dead fish, and 
then he would roll in it. The deader the fish was, the 
better he liked it; he thought it was perfumery, I 
guess. He would wander for miles around our island, 
and even swim across the slough to Oak Island and 
wander there, hunting a dead fish to perfume him¬ 
self with. And he was such an affectionate and lov¬ 
ing dog, and so proud of himself when he was all 

69 




JIBBY JONES 


perfumed up, that mother and the rest of us just 
hated him when he was that way. 

If I had known Rover was coming up that day, I 
would have gone around the shore of our island and 
the shore of Oak Island and got rid of all the dead 
fish, but Rover’s coming was a surprise, and we had 
had the fishing-prize contest that day, so all there 
was to do was to tie him up and let him howl. His 
howling was pretty bad, but it wasn’t as bad as 
dead fish, which is about the worst thing there is. 

Well, after Orpheus Cadwallader passed our 
cottage again, going back, I turned over on my 
stomach and hoped I’d go to sleep, and I expected 
Rover would have a fine all-night howl, but all of a 
sudden he stopped howling and began to bark. It 
was his angry “Woof! woof!” bark, with a mean 
snarl at the end, which meant somebody was around 
who had no business to be around. 

I sat up in bed, and I could feel the old cottage 
joggle as Rover jerked at his rqpe, and then, sud¬ 
denly, the rope broke and off Rover went, barking 
to beat the band, full tilt toward the slough back of 
our cottages. About halfway there, I should judge, 
he came up with what had set him to barking. I 
heard a rough voice say, “Get away from here! Get 
away from here!” and a club thumping on Rover’s 
back, and more barking, and swearing, and then 
Rover yipped, and began to scream — if you can 
call it that — the way a dog does when it is hurt, or 
has its paw run over by a wagon, or breaks a toe. 

70 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 


In a second I was out of bed and getting into my 
clothes, and I heard Rover come yipping and whin¬ 
ing back toward the cottage. I did not have many 
clothes to put on, and in a couple of seconds I was 
downstairs, and by the time I was out there and 
Rover was whining at my feet, Wampus and his 
Uncle Oscar and Skippy and Tad and Jibby were 
out there, too, and we heard Orph Cadwallader 
coming running as fast as such a fat man could. 

Orph had his shotgun, and Wampus’s Uncle 
Oscar had a pistol, and Jibby had brought along an 
electric torch. We looked at Rover’s foot and saw it 
was hurt pretty bad, and that one of his ears was cut 
where it had been hit, and we were all pretty mad. 
Nobody had a right to be on our island but us, and 
most of the time nobody was there but the women 
and us kids and Orph Cadwallader, and tramps had 
no business there. They were too dangerous. 

So Wampus’s Uncle Oscar took the electric torch 
from Jibby and said: 

“You boys stay back here; this is a man’s job. 
Orph and I will attend to this!” 

So the five of us, Jibby and Wampus and Tad and 
Skippy and I, we went along with Orph and Wam¬ 
pus’s uncle. I held the piece of rope that was tied 
around Rover’s neck, and he limped along, whining. 
We made quite a procession, and when we looked 
back we could see that all the cottages were lighted 
up. Everybody was out of bed. You couldn’t expect 
us to stay back when there was so much excitement. 

7i 


JIBRY JONES 


We went through the woods and, before we had 
gone very far, the light from the electric torch 
picked out two men who were standing waist-deep 
in the stinging nettles under the trees, waiting for us 
to come up to them. It was easy to guess that they 
had started away from where Rover had met them, 
and that they had then heard us and stopped. And 
that was not like river-rats or tramps who had come 
to snoop around and steal what they could and then 
get away again. That kind come in skiffs, and, if you 
see them, they scoot for their skiffs and row away 
as fast as they can. But these men waited for us. 

“What’s this mean? What you doing on this is¬ 
land? What you hurt this dog for?” Wampus’s 
Uncle Oscar asked when we came up to the men. 

They were river-rats, all right, or tramps, or 
toughs of some kind; you could tell that by their 
looks. And one was the toughest-looking customer 
I ever did see! He had only one eye and that was 
an ugly one — keen and wicked-looking. His right 
hand had only two fingers and a thumb, and there 
were three deep scars across his face. He had a reg¬ 
ular pirate’s bunch of black whiskers, and all he 
needed was a red sash with a couple of pistols stuck 
in it, and a cutlass, and a red handkerchief tied 
around his head, and a pair of brass rings in his ears, 
to look like a real pirate. And when he moved out 
from the nettles we saw he had one wooden leg — 
scarred and chipped as if he had used it to break 
rocks. 


72 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 


His mate, the other man, was smaller and meaner- 
looking, if anybody could look meaner. He looked 
like a rat — sneaky-looking. We called him the Rat 
when we talked about him afterward. So when 
Wampus’s uncle shouted at them, they looked at 
us. 

“That’s all right, boss; that’s all right!” the 
Tough Customer said. “No harm meant. Pardner 
and I don’t mean no harm. We didn’t know any¬ 
body was on this island. We wouldn’t do no harm.” 

“What did you try to kill that dog for, then?” 
Wampus’s uncle asked, and no fooling, either. 

“Well, he come at us, boss,” the Tough Customer 
said. “We was just walking through here and the 
dog come at us. So I took a swipe at him with a 
club. Anybody would, boss, when a dog comes at 
him that way.” 

“Well, you look here!” Wampus’s uncle said. 
“This is a private island, owned by folks, and no¬ 
body is allowed on it. And no nonsense about it, 
either. You get off, and you stay off, or you’re liable 
to get shot, or worse. You get off this island now, 
and you stay off it hereafter.” 

“Yes, sure, boss!” the Tough Customer said. 
“We’ll do that; we don’t mean no harm; we wouldn’t 
touch anything, anyhow.” 

And that might have been all right, but just then 
something went “ Arr-awk — arr-awk! ” — and any¬ 
body would have known it was a chicken. Orpheus 
Cadwallader made about five steps, and grabbed the 

73 


JIBBY JONES 


Rat, and stuck his hand into the Rat’s shirt, and, 
sure enough, in the back of the Rat’s shirt was one of 
Orpheus’s own chickens. It gave a flop of its wings 
and scooted for its coop, making big flying leaps and 
scolding as it went. So Orph made a swipe at the 
Rat with the end of his gun, but the Rat dodged, 
and then turned and ran as hard as his legs could 
carry him. Orph let fly with both barrels of his 
shotgun, but there were too many trees; he did not 
even pepper the Rat. 

“So!” said Wampus’s uncle. “That’s the idea, is 
it? Well, we’ll just see you off the island right here 
and now. Where’s your boat?” 

The Tough Customer looked at the pistol Wam¬ 
pus’s uncle carried, and I guess he decided that 
Wampus’s uncle wouldn’t shoot a man in the back, 
not unless he ran, anyway, and he turned and 
stumped off toward the bank of the slough until he 
came to the path, and then he turned down the path 
a hundred yards, and all of us following him. 

There was a place there where the arum and 
pickerel weed came close to the shore, but the water 
was two or three feet deep, and tied to a tree there 
was a shanty-boat — one of the smallest and worst 
old shanty-boats I ever saw. It did not look over 
ten feet long, and it wasn’t more than five feet wide, 
with not a window in it, and the deck not over two 
feet wide. The boards of which it was made were 
thin and old and warped, and the only power was a 
ten-foot pole with a board nailed on one end. 

74 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 


When he came to the shanty-boat, the Tough 
Customer stopped to untie his shore line and threw 
it aboard. He did not say another word. He took 
his ten-foot pole from the roof of the shanty-boat 
and braced it against the shore and pushed, and the 
boat slithered among the weeds and glided out from 
the shore. 

We stood and watched until the shanty-boat was 
out in the middle of the slough, where the current 
caught it and swung it slowly downstream. Then 
the Tough Customer rested and looked toward us, 
and swore at us strong and steady for a long while, 
and Wampus’s uncle said it was all over, and we 
went home. I looked Rover’s paw and ear over, and 
saw they were not so bad, so I tied him up again and 
went to bed. Of course, mother asked all about what 
had happened, *and said she had been frightened 
when she heard the gunshots, but she was glad 
everything was all right and the tramps were off the 
island. 

The next morning there was only one thing for 
me to do if I wanted to have mother let me keep 
Rover on the Island, and that was to explore for 
dead fish and get them out of the way. So we all 
went — all five of us boys. We went down the chute 
side of the island first, but we didn’t find a single 
dead fish, because all the folks know about Rover, 
and they don’t leave any dead dogfish or other kinds 
on shore when they catch them. So we got as far 
as the end of the island, downstream, and started 

75 


JIBBY JONES 


along up the slough side of the island, and all of a 
sudden Wampus stopped short. 

“Look there,” he said, bending down and point¬ 
ing. “There’s that Tough Customer’s shanty-boat. 
He didn’t quit the island. He only floated down and 
landed lower down.” 

We all bent low and saw the shanty-boat. It was 
in a sort of small cove, where the willows must have 
hid it from the slough, and I don’t suppose anybody 
could have seen it from the island except from the 
very spot where we were. 

“Come on!” I whispered. “Let’s go and get 
Orph and your Uncle Oscar, and tell them.” 

But Jibby Jones put out a hand and held me 
back. 

“This doesn’t look right,” he said, shaking his 
head. “This looks evil to me. Those men were told 
to get off the island, and they said they would get 
off the island, and there’s no honest reason why they 
should be on the island. All they had to do when 
they were out in the slough last night was to let their 
shanty-boat drift and they would have gone on 
down past here. They must mean some devilment on 
the island, and we ought to know what it is.” 

Well, that seemed reasonable, and Jibby said 
what we must do. We must crawl up through the 
willows and investigate. The only trouble was 
Rover. I couldn’t tie him to a tree because he would 
howl, and, if I dragged him through the willows, he 
would see the shanty-boat and bark, and, if I turned 

.76 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 


him loose, he would probably jump all around and go 
to the shanty-boat and scare the Tough Customer 
and the Rat into fits. But Jibby fixed that. He said 
the thing for me to do was to take Rover and go 
back and get Orph Cadwallader and Wampus’s 
uncle. So I went. 

Jibby and the boys crawled as close to the shanty- 
boat as they could, Indian fashion, and lay in the 
willows, and they were in luck, because the Tough 
Customer and the Rat were talking. 

“No, sir!” the Tough Customer was saying. “I 
don’t stay on any island where caretakers go around 
with shotguns, shooting them off any time of the day 
or night.” 

“ I don’t see that you’ve got any kick to make 
about shotguns,” the Rat said, in his whining voice. 
“I’m the one that got shot at.” 

“I don’t care who got shot at,” the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer said. “ Four or five barrels of cider wouldn’t 
pay me for getting my hide full of birdshot, not if it 
was the hardest cider on earth. And you don’t know 
that they hid the cider on this island — you only 
think so. It may be on any island in the whole 
river. You just forget that cider, pardner, and let’s 
get to hunting that treasure I know about.” 

“Well, it ain’t playing me square,” the Rat 
whined. “A bargain is a bargain, and the bargain 
was that, if I paid my money and bought this shanty- 
boat, you would help me find that cider first, and 
help me get away with it and sell it. And I as good 

77 


JIBBY JONES 


as know it was on this island them barrels of cider 
was hid. And, if so, on this island is where we want 
to be.” 

“And get shot full of birdshot or, maybe, buck¬ 
shot,” sneered the Tough Customer. “Why, man 
alive! just now after these island folks is all roused 
up is no time to hunt around on this island for a few 
pesky barrels of cider. They’ll all be carrying shot¬ 
guns for the next month or so. No, sir! Now is the 
time to stay away from this island. We can come 
back later on if you want to, but now is the time to 
be hunting that land pirate’s treasure.” 

“You don’t know how much it is, and you don’t 
know where it is, and you don’t even know if there 
is any,” complained the Rat. 

“All right!” said the Tough Customer. “Maybe 
I know more than you think I do. Maybe I ain’t 
told you all I know yet. Maybe I thought I would 
just wait and see if you was a reasonable cuss and 
willing to do the wise thing, or if you was a sort of 
idiot that would want to hang around an island and 
get shot full of buckshot and bullets for a few barrels 
of no-account cider. How about that?” 

“ ’Tain’t right! ’Tain’t right!” the Rat com¬ 
plained. “ Pardners ought to be fair and square and 
tell all. Next thing you’ll be saying you won’t split 
half and half.” 

“Half and half was what I said, and half and half 
holds good,” said the Tough Customer. “And this 
will, maybe, be a big thing. I’ll play fair with you if 

78 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 


you play fair with me. Will you play fair? Hope to 
die and may your throat be cut, if you don’t?” 

“Hope to die and may my throat be cut if I 
don’t!” said the Rat. “Fair and square, or may the 
dogs eat us!” 

“Now, that’s talking,” said the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer. “Look here, now!” 

They heard him feeling around among the boards 
of the shanty-boat, inside and nearest the corner to 
the boys. 

“I got a map of the whole business,” the Tough 
Customer said. “You didn’t know that, did you? 
It’s been right there in that split board back of the 
lantern ever since I come aboard this boat. And 
you would never have seen it if you hadn’t played 
fair and square with me, you bet! Gimme that 
board there to spread it out on.” 

They heard the Rat move around and then the 
Tough Customer spoke again. 

“When I was down there in Helena, like I told 
you,” he said, “they stuck me in jail for ten days for 
being a vagrant, and there was a fellow in my cell 
with me, see? A red-headed fellow with a scar over 
one eye. And he shines up to me about the second 
day, and says I’m the sort of man he’s looking for. 
He says he knows where pirate’s treasure is, and he’s 
getting up a gang to go and get it. Only, he’s in 
jail for three months for stealing a hog, you under¬ 
stand? And he needs somebody that’s going to be 
free soon, to make some preparations and one thing 

79 


JIBBY JONES 


and another. So he shows me this map that he stole 
off an old nigger down there.” 





rate’s own brother to show where the treasure was,” 
said the Tough Customer. “So I said I’d go in with 
him, and he explained all he knew about the map, 
and the night before I was turned loose I stole the 
map off him, and I dropped it through the window. 
And the next day, when I was turned loose, I went 
around under the window and picked up the map 
and beat it for up here as fast as I could. Because 
this here word on the back of the map is the key 
word. 1 Riverbank,’ see? That’s the place to go to, 
to start out from, to find the treasure.” 

80 





THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 


“Well, you couldn’t be much nearer,” said the 
Rat. 

“All right! And here’s the map itself,” said the 
Tough Customer. “You say you know places here¬ 
abouts; what do you make of it?” 

“Let me get a good look at it,” said the Rat. 
“Why, pshaw! It looks plain enough! Here’s the 
river, because it is marked ‘river.’ And this bent 
business is a slough coming into the river. And this 
crooked line would be a creek emptying into the 
slough.” 

“That’s how I’d make it out,” said the Tough 
Customer. 

“Sure! ” said the Rat. “And these lines mean two 
roads crossing each other, don’t they? And this is 
a house or barn in the lot at the crossroads. And 
here’s a cross-mark — this X here. That ought to 
be where the treasure is buried, hey?” 

“Well, now, would it be?” asked the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer. “How about this arrow? This arrow points 
right to where the road crosses the creek. Don’t 
that mean that that is where the treasure is? Sup¬ 
pose there is a bridge there, or a culvert. Mightn t 
the money be hid there? Well, we could look both 
places. How about this ‘ 23 miles ’ and ‘ Greenland ? 

“Greenland? Sure enough, that says Greenland! ” 
said the Rat, all excited. “Why, pardner, this is the 
easiest thing you ever saw! I know where this 
Greenland is — Greenland is a crossroads store up 
the river four or five miles from here, over on the 

81 


JIBBY JONES 


Illinois side, just on top of the hills. Used to be 
quite a village, years ago, but it’s only a store and 
post-office now. Why, I can take you right there, 
pardner. And there’s a creek there, too, crosses the 
road. Only — 

“Greenland ain’t any 23 miles back from the 
slough, or from the river, either. It’s only — say!” 

The boys heard him slap his knee. 

“Why, shucks!” he exclaimed. “That ain’t 23 
miles. That’s meant for two-three miles. Two or 
three miles. And that’s about what this Greenland 
store is back from the river.” 

He let his voice fall into a mysterious whisper. 

“Why, pardner,” he whispered, “this is as easy as 
falling off a log! We can walk right to the spot. And 
that arrow don’t point to no treasure, either. That 
arrow is like any other arrow on a map — it points 
north. It was put there to show where north is.” 

“But that would make the Mississippi River 
flow from east to west,” objected the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer. 

“And that’s why I say so!” declared the Rat. 
“ Because it does flow right spang from east to west, 
all the way from Derlingport to Riverbank — thirty 
good miles! If that map showed a river flowing from 
north to south, it would be wrong, because the Mis¬ 
sissippi don’t flow that way at Greenland store. 
You bet! All we’ve got to do is to go right to the 
bank of the creek where that cross-mark is, and if 
that treasure is there, we’ll find her!” 

82 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 


“So you’ll put off cider-hunting awhile, I guess,” 
said the Tough Customer. “Gimme the map; I’ll 
put it back where I keep it.” 

He shuffled around inside the boat, putting the 
map back. 

“Well, now,” the Rat said, “as to putting off 
hunting that cider, it seems to me, seeing we’re right 
here on the island, we might take a day or two 
and — ” 

What he would have said next nobody ever knew, 
for here came Orph Cadwallader and Wampus’s 
Uncle Oscar and Rover and I, and Orph had his gun 
and an axe, and Uncle Oscar had his pistol and an 
axe, and they were mad! They were mighty mad! 
Orph handed me his gun and up with his axe and 
chopped the shore line of the shanty-boat, and 
swung the axe and brought it down whang against 
the end of the boat. You should have seen the 
boards fly! In three blows Orph had the whole end 
of that shanty-boat knocked to splinters, and the 
Tough Customer and the Rat were out into the 
water, shouting and swearing and pulling the boat 
through the willows into the slough, to try to save 
some of it, anyway, and Orph stooped and picked up 
slabs of wet driftwood and slammed them at the 
two. 

When the shanty-boat was out past the willow 
fringe, the Tough Customer swung aboard and 
grabbed his pole and began poling for dear life, 
shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and then 

83 


JIBBY JONES 


Orph slung one last slab at them and missed by ten 
feet, and about all that was left of the excitement 
was Rover, trying to bark his head off. 

“That’s the end of them!" Orph said. “That’ll be 
the last we ever see of those two.’’ 

He took his gun and he and Uncle Oscar started 
down toward the end of the island to watch the 
shanty-boat float by, and we all started down there 
with them. But when Jibby had gone a few yards, 
he stopped short. Then he turned back and worked 
his way through the willows to where the shanty- 
boat had been. He picked up a broken board and 
bent over the water and fished something white out 
from among the splinters of houseboat. 

“What is it?” I asked, and he opened it and 
showed me. 

It was the map of the pirate’s treasure place. 


CHAPTER VIII 

THE RED-HEADED BANDIT 

Well, as soon as Jibby Jones got the map, we went 
down to the lower end of the island, and we saw the 
Tough Customer’s shanty-boat floating out of the 
slough and on down the river, and then we went 
back. 

Orpheus Cadwallader and Wampus’s Uncle Os¬ 
car went back to the cottages, and we boys began 
looking for dead fish where we had left off, and as 
we looked we talked about the Tough Customer and 
the Rat and the land pirate’s treasure. We did not 
study the map then, because it was soaking wet. 
Jibby Jones pinned it inside his hat, so it could dry 
out there. 

As we went along, Skippy and Tad and Wampus 
told me what they had heard the Tough Customer 
say to the Rat, and what they had heard the Rat say 
to the Tough Customer, and when they had told it 
all, Wampus said to me: 

“George, I’ll bet the man the Tough Customer 
stole the map from was the Red-Headed Bandit 
that tried to steal Rover last year. Because, listen 
— the Red-Headed Bandit had a scar over his eye, 
didn’t he?” 

“You bet he did!” I said. And all of a sudden I 
had a scared feeling, as if there was danger and mys- 

85 


JIBBY JONES 


tery all around me and I knew it, but couldn’t see 
where or what it was exactly. You get the same 
feeling, sometimes, when you are walking through a 
big patch of weeds, taller than your head, and all of 
a sudden you hear a queer noise to the left of you, 
and a queer noise to the right of you, and then a 
cobweb strikes you across the face and sticks there, 
and you hear another queer noise behind you. That’s 
how I felt now — as if there was queerness and 
mystery all around our island. Because here was 
the Red-Headed Bandit in this pirate’s treasure 
business, and I had never thought of the Red- 
Headed Bandit as anything much. 

The business of the Red-Headed Bandit was like 
this: A year ago, the year before Jibby Jones came 
to our island, my sister May was going to be married 
to Mr. Edwin Skreever, of Derlingport, Iowa, on 
September i ith, in the evening. They were going to 
be married at our house down in town — in River- 
bank — and from the way May and mother talked 
about it you would think it was going to be grand 
and lovely and everything. So May said to mother: 

“Well, I suppose George and Wampus will have 
to be at the wedding, but I tremble to think of it. 

I know they will do some awful thing and spoil 
everything, but I suppose they will have to be 
there.” 

May knew mighty well I wouldn’t go to her wed- 
ding or to anybody’s wedding unless Wampus went, 
too. We always go together. 

86 


THE RED-HEADED BANDIT 

“We’ll just have to hope for the best,” mother 
said. 

“Well, there is one thing certain,” May said, “ I’m 
not going to have those two boys down there until 
the last possible moment. When we go down to 
make the preparations, I want them left up here on 
the island where they will be out of mischief.” 

That suited me, all right! I didn’t want to go 
down and have May nagging at me with her “Do 
keep your hands off that, George!” and “Please 
don’t touch that, George!” 

We had been up there on Birch Island all summer 
— our family and Wampus Smale’s family and a 
dozen other families — living in the cottages on 
stilts and having a good time on the island and on 
the good old Mississippi. So, about the 1st of Sep¬ 
tember, most of the families went back down to 
town, but our family and the Smales did not. They 
waited a few days longer. 

Just about then — about the 1st of September — 
Mr. Edwin Skreever came down from Derlingport 
in his motor-boat to visit with us until the wedding. 
I don’t say I liked him much; neither did Wampus. 
Maybe he was all right, but he was no fun. He 
thought he was wonderful, I guess, and May thought 
so, but he was too haughty to suit me. I guess he 
didn’t like boys much and he thought he had to be 
severe and solemn with them. He acted as if he 
thought he might die if the creases got out of his 
trousers. He had no use for my dog, either. He was 

87 



JIBBY JONES 


always saying: “Down! Lie down! Get down! Get 
out!” to Rover. He did not like him. 

You see, Rover is a pretty big dog and affection¬ 
ate. He would rush up to Mr. Edwin Skreever and 
jump up on him and try to kiss him on the face. 
Sometimes he would get one paw on Mr. Edwin 
Skreever’s necktie and one paw on his collar, and 
sometimes he would get one paw on Mr. Edwin 
Skreever’s vest and the other sort of tangled in his 
watch-chain. Then Mr. Edwin Skreever would 
whack at him and say: “Get down you beast!” But 
not when May was handy. 

Rover was my dog, because May had given him to 
me, but he was May’s dog, too, because Mr. Jack 
Betts had given him to May. I never knew when 
Rover was my dog and when he was May’s dog, 
because girls are mostly Indian givers. When she 
wanted to pet Rover and take him walking, he was 
May’s dog — so she claimed — but when Rover 
howled or needed to be fed, May would say: “For 
goodness’ sake, George, attend to that dog of 
yours!” 

I guess one reason Mr. Edwin Skreever did not 
care much for Rover was because Mr. Jack Betts had 
given him to May. I guess Mr. Edwin Skreever was 
jealous, because when Mr. Jack Betts gave Rover to 
May everybody thought Mr. Jack Betts was the one 
she was going to be married to. 

Well, no matter! I only want to tell you the awful 
fix Wampus and I got into on account of being left 

88 



THE RED-HEADED BANDIT 


up there on the island where we would be out of 
mischief. 

On the 9th of September Parcell came up in his big 
motor-launch and took May and mother and the 
Smales all down to town to get ready for May’s 
wedding. So they left Mr. Edwin Skreever on the 
island with me and Wampus, because we could go 
down in Mr. Edwin Skreever’s motor-boat on the 
nth, which was the wedding day. I guess they were 
almost as glad to have Mr. Edwin Skreever out of 
the way as they were to have me and Wampus out 
of the way. 

That left nobody on the island but us three and 
Orpheus Cadwallader, who is the caretaker and stays 
on the island all winter. He was to close up our 
cottage when we left. 

So that was all right. The last thing May said be¬ 
fore she got aboard Parcell’s launch was: 

“Now, George, you be sure you don’t let Rover 
wander off somewhere so you can’t bring him down 
when you come. You had better tie him up.” 

I’ve told you about Rover, and how he would 
wander for miles around the island, and even swim 
across to Oak Island and wander there, hunting a 
dead fish to perfume himself with. 

The only way to keep him from wandering after 
dead fish was to tie him up, and then he howled all 
night. That was his second bad habit, and it was al¬ 
most worse than dead fish. He was the loudest and 
saddest howler I ever heard. When you tied him up, 

89 


JIBBY JONES 


he would sit down on his haunches and put his nose 
up and open his mouth and just let loose all the 
agony of all the dogs that ever suffered pain or sor¬ 
row from the days of Adam right on to to-day. And 
loudly, too. When Rover really got interested in 
howling, you could hear him five miles. 

The only thing in Riverbank or anywhere near it 
that made as much noise as Rover’s howl was Mr. 
Jack Betts’s motor-boat. His motor-boat was a 
speed boat and was called the Skittery III, because 
Mr. Jack Betts had run the Skittery I and the 
Skittery II onto snags and mashed them to splinters. 
I guess that was one reason why May did not want 
to marry Mr. Jack Betts — she was afraid he would 
mash himself to splinters some day. A husband that 
is mashed to splinters is not much use around the 
house. 

Mr. Edwin Skreever used to say: 

‘‘That’s Jack Betts all over! He uses a barrel of 
gasoline every time he takes out that boat of his — 
fourteen dollars to risk his life for ten miles of idiotic 
speed, and he hasn’t a dollar in the bank! Twenty- 
seven years old and not a dollar to his name!” 

Even father would not ride in the Skittery III. It 
was a much faster boat than the others and could 
make thirty-five miles an hour upstream on our old 
Mississippi, and that is some speed! When it was 
going full tilt the Skittery III stood up on about 
three inches of the stern end of its keel and simply 
skittered on the water, and all twelve cylinders 

90 


THE RED-HEADED BANDIT 


screamed. It made more noise than forty airplanes. 
It made more noise than ten planing mills. I never 
knew anything that made such a noise. 

And go? Mr. Jack Betts and his chauffeur had to- 
wear leather helmets to keep the wind from blowing 
the hair right off their heads. Father said that if the 
boat ever took a nose dive it would ram itself so deep 
into the bottom of the water that Jack Betts would 
have to go around to China and pull it the rest of the 
way through — only there wouldn’t be any Jack 
Betts to go to China. 

Well, about four o’clock on September ioth we 
heard a noise down the river that sounded like forty- 
seven sawmills and we knew Mr. Jack Betts was 
starting the Skittery III. Town is four miles down 
river and in about a minute the Skittery III came 
roaring up into our chute and Mr. Jack Betts shut 
off the power and taxied in to the shore of our island. 
He had a note for Mr. Edwin Skreever, and it was 
from May. Mr. Jack Betts stood around and asked 
if there was any answer. Mr. Edwin Skreever said 
there was not — that May only wanted him to go 
down a little earlier the next day than she had told 
him before. He was rather stiff about it, and Mr. 
Jack Betts was just as stiff, and after a minute or 
two Mr. Jack Betts went down and got into the 
Skittery III and skittered back to town. 

Wampus and I sat on the rocks of the ripraps in 
front of our cottage and watched the Skittery III 
skitter. Old Rover was there, piling all over us, and 

91 



JIBBY JONES 


we kept pushing him away and telling him to sit 
down. Every now and then he would tangle us in the 
rope that was tied to his collar. 

'‘You had better tie up that dog,” Mr. Edwin 
Skreever said. “ If he wanders off to-night, you may 
not have him to-morrow.” 

Now, just notice how things happen in this world 
sometimes. Mr. Edwin Skreever was on the porch of 
our cottage, behind the wire screens where the mos¬ 
quitoes could not get at him, and he was not very 
quiet. I guess he was thinking of how he would have 
to be married the next day. Anyway, he was walk¬ 
ing up and down the porch, putting his hands into 
his pockets and taking them out again. Every 
minute or so he would say something to us, as a man 
does when he is nervous. First he would tell us to 
tie up the dog, then he would say he hoped the dog 
did wander away, and that he would be glad if he 
never saw the dog again. 

“And just you let me tell you one thing!” he said. 
“I’m not going to have that dog jumping all over me 
at my wedding. I’m not going to have that dog 
clawing all over me and clawing all over May and 
making a general nuisance of himself. And I won’t 
have him tied up and howling. I’m not going to let 
that dog spoil my wedding. You understand that!” 

I just said “Aw! ” and went on talking with Wam¬ 
pus and wrestling with Rover. So, in a little while, 
the Bright Star came along down the river with a 
couple of Government barges loaded with willows. 

92 


THE RED-HEADED BANDIT 


There are not many boats on the river now, so Wam¬ 
pus and I looked at the Bright Star as she went by, 
and when she reached the lower end of our island 
she veered in and laid the two barges alongside the 
ripraps. The men ran a couple of cables ashore and 
made the two barges fast by hitching the cables to a 
couple of trees and then the Bright Star sheered off 
and crossed the chute and went out of sight behind 
Buffalo Island, across the chute. It was no fun sit¬ 
ting where we were listening to Mr. Edwin Skreever 
scold, so Wampus and I got up and went down the 
path to take a look at the two barges. 

They were like plenty of other Government barges 
we had seen. These two had their numbers painted 
on them — “U.S. 420” and “U.S. 426” — and they 
were seventeen feet wide and eighty-two feet long. 
Wampus and I had been in and over those very two 
barges more than once. We knew just how they 
were made and all about them. 

The two barges, as they lay along the shore there, 
were piled high with cut willows. The Government 
men cut the willows where they grow at the lower 
ends of islands and take them on the barges to places 
where they are repairing dams or ripraps. They 
throw the willows on the dams, butt end upstream, 
and dump rocks on them. Ripraps along the banks 
are made that same way. It is not often you see two 
barges alone; the steamer usually tows four or six at 
a time. All these barges are decked over. The decks 
are made of four-inch planks, and at each end of this 

93 


JIBBY JONES 


flooring are two hatches, with lids. When nobody is 
around to order a fellow off the barges, he can pull up 
these hatch covers and get inside the barges. 

The inside of one of those barges is not much of a 
place to be in. When you go down through the 
hatch, you see that the inside is damp, with maybe 
three or four inches of water in it, and a smell of tar 
or oakum. It is about five feet from the bottom 
boards to the floorboards, so a fellow can stand up 
there, but he can’t run much because there are criss¬ 
cross braces. Neither is the inside of a barge one 
big room. Two great, thick bulkheads, or wooden 
walls, run lengthwise of the barge and cut it into 
three narrow halls — as you might call them — 
eighty feet long and about five feet wide. 

These two barges were pretty well loaded with 
willows. One of them was loaded from the tip of its 
bow to the end of its stern — willows piled ten or 
twelve feet high. The other, the “U.S. 420,” was 
almost as well loaded, but not quite. 

So Wampus and I stood looking at the barges and 
we thought maybe we would climb aboard and 
climb on the willows and have some fun, but, when 
we were going to, a man we hadn’t seen sat up and 
looked at us. He had red hair and a scar over one 
eye. And that was the first we saw of the Red- 
Headed Bandit. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER 

The Red-Headed Bandit had been lying on top of 
the willows, and when he sat up so sudden he gave us 
a scare. We did not like the looks of him. 

“Hello!” he said, and he looked us over. Then he 
said, “Where did you get that dog?” 

“ Raised him from a pup,” I said. 

“What!” he exclaimed. “Don’t try to tell me 
anything like that, young feller. That’s my dog. A 
feller stole that dog from me.” 

Well,-I began to back away. I reached down and 
got hold of the rope that was fastened to Rover’s 
collar. 

“He did not!” I said. “Mr. Jack Betts gave my 
sister this dog when he was a pup.” 

“Well, don’t get mad!” the man said. “It might 
be I am mistaken. What will you take for the dog? 
I’ll give you a quarter for him.” 

“He ain’t for sale,” I said. 

“I’ll give you half a dollar.” 

“No, he ain’t for sale.” 

“Give you a dollar for him,” said the man, but I 
didn’t wait to have any more talk with him. I 
started back for our cottage. 

Mr. Edwin Skreever was still walking up and 
down the porch and I sat down on the rocks. Wam- 

95 


JIBBY JONES 


pus stood a minute or so, and then he reached into 
his pocket and took out a nail. He had a pocket half 
full of old, rusty nails he had knocked out of old 
driftwood — old iron nails, all sizes. 

“Look here, Mr. Skreever,” he said, “can you do 
this?” 

He took the nail, flat, between his thumb and two 
first fingers and threw it as hard as he could out over 
the river, making it spin, and it sang as it went. 
Whine is a better word; it whined like a guitar string 
when you pick it and then run your thumb up it. 

“ Did you ever hear anybody make a nail sing like 
that?” Wampus asked. 

“ Yes,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever, “ I have. I have 
heard that before. And I cannot imagine why it is 
a boy delights in throwing away perfectly good nails 
for the mere satisfaction of hearing them make a 
useless noise. You may wish, some day, that you 
had not thrown away that nail.” 

“Aw!” Wampus said. 

“It is a useless and uncalled-for waste,” said Mr. 
Edwin Skreever. “Nails cost money. Nails cost 
labor and time. A miner must dig the iron ore, and 
another miner must dig coal, and laborers must turn 
the ore into iron and fashion the nails from the iron. 
Salesmen must go out and sell the nails, railroads 
must carry them, other salesmen must sell them 
again. And you throw them into the river! Why? 
What good does it do you?” 

Wampus just said “Aw!” again, because he did 

96 


THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER 

not know what else to say, and I thought I was 
gladder than ever that I wasn’t going to marry Mr. 
Edwin Skreever. I was glad he was going to live in 
Derlingport and not in Riverbank. I don’t like fel¬ 
lows that lecture you when you throw away an old 
rusty nail. So I said to Wampus: 

“ Let’s eat a muskmelon.” 

Well, all summer we had had a pile of muskmelons 
and watermelons under the cottage. They’re cheap 
and whenever we wanted to eat one we did. We 
used to get them by the skiff load. We would sit on 
the ripraps and eat and throw the rinds into the 
river, and the yellow-jacket hornets would come by 
the hundreds and pile all over any rinds that did not 
fall in the river. They would crowd onto any juice 
that fell on the rocks, and they would light on the 
very piece you were eating. There were lots of 
yellow-jackets, but nobody minded them. If they 
got in the way we flicked them off with a finger. 

But there is one queer thing about yellow-jackets. 
They will buzz around and fly around all summer 
and never sting you unless, perhaps, you step on one 
with your bare foot, but there comes a day sooner 
or later when every yellow-jacket everywhere gets 
hopping mad. All the yellow-jackets for miles 
around go crazy on the same day. Maybe they all go 
crazy at the same hour of the same day — or the 
same minute — I don’t know. Anyway, this was the 
day. September ioth was the day the yellow-jackets 
quit being calm and gentle that year and began to be 

97 



JIBBY JONES 


angry and go around with chips on their shoulders 
looking for a fight. So the first yellow-jacket Wam¬ 
pus flicked off him swore a blue streak in yellow- 
jacket language and buzzed in a circle to get up 
speed and banged right into Wampus’s neck. Zingo! 

Wampus made one jump and grabbed his cap and 
slashed at the air and in a minute a dozen yellow- 
jackets were on the war-path. The next one to sting 
went at Rover’s nose like a shot out of a rifle. We 
heard poor Rover give one wild “ Yeowp!” and he 
jumped about six feet in the air and when he came 
down he was already running. He went out of sight 
down the path, making about twenty feet at each 
jump and “yeowping” at the top of his voice, and 
his “yeowps” grew fainter and fainter. Mr. Edwin 
Skreever laughed, but I stood still, just holding my 
hat ready to swat any yellow-jacket that came too 
near me. 

“Come on!” I said to Wampus, “let’s get away 
from here. It’s stinging time.” 

So we gathered up the rest of our muskmelons 
and got away from there as quietly as we could. We 
went up to his cottage, which was all boarded up, 
and sat on the step. 

Well, about six o’clock Orpheus Cadwallader 
came down from his shack to get our supper for us. 
He brought a spring chicken and fried it and we had 
a good supper, and then Wampus and I went out 
front. We fooled around awhile and Mr. Edwin 
Skreever lighted the lamp and wrote some letters or 

98 


THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER 

his will or something. It was none of our business 
what he wrote. Orpheus Cadwallader washed the 
dishes and then came out and said he was going to 
row down to town, and he went off in his skiff. 

Then, presently, Wampus said: 

“Where’s Rover?” 

“Gosh!” I said, “I bet he’s wandering!” 

“We’d better find him,” Wampus said, and I 
knew that was so. 

I thought I knew where he would be, over back by 
the slough where there were some dogfish on the 
shore that would never swim again. 

Mr. Edwin Skreever came out on the porch. 

“Where are you going?” he asked. 

“Rover ran away,” I said. “We’ve got to find 
him.” 

“Oh, drat you and your Rover!” he said. “Didn’t 
May tell you not to let that dog run away? You cer¬ 
tainly do aggravate me! For two cents I would go 
down to town now and be quit of your foolishness.” 

I did not say anything but Wampus did. 

“Why don’t you go, then?” he asked. “We 
wouldn’t care.” 

So we went to find Rover. We worked back to the 
slough, calling him all the while — “Here, Rover! 
Here, Rover! Here, Rover!” — but not a yip nor 
bark from him. We went up the slough and down 
the slough calling him, and it began to get dark. 
Then, suddenly, Wampus stopped short. 

“Say!” he said. 

99 



> 



JIBBY JONES 


“What?” 

“ I know! That fellow got him — that red-headed 
fellow on the barge! ’ ’ 

“I bet he did!” I said. 

Well, it seemed likely that that was what had 
happened. So Wampus and I stood there in the dark 
a minute. 

“Well, we’ve got to get him,” I said. “I’m not 
going to have anybody steal my dog. Come on!” 

We worked through the weeds and bushes, across 
toward the chute and down toward the two willow 
barges. We came out not far from them as we saw 
the red light the man had put on the barges as a sig¬ 
nal. Then we crept along Indian fashion, bent over, 
toward the barges. 

“He would put him inside,” Wampus said, and I 
knew that as well as Wampus did. That was what 
any dog-thief would do — put Rover down inside 
the barge and close the hatch cover. We crept close 
to the barges. I picked up a good-sized stone and so 
did Wampus. 

Well, just as we got close up to the “ U.S. 420 ” we 
heard Rover. We heard just one bark and then we 
saw a man lifting the hatch cover. The man slid 
down inside the barge and eased the cover back into 
place over his head, and then we heard no more 
barking. The cover was thick and heavy and I guess 
he wanted to shut in Rover’s barks while he was 
tying him fast. 

Come on! I said, and the next minute I was on 


100 


THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER 


the barge and Wampus after me. Then I did not 
know what to do. We couldn’t yank up that cover 
and go down and take Rover away from the man, 
because he might kill us or something. But Wampus 
knew what to do. 

“Here! ” he said, and he tossed me a handful of his 
rusty nails. “Hurry up! Get busy! Nail this cover 
down!” 

So we did. We used the two rocks as hammers 
and drove in the nails, and then we jumped for 
shore and ran, because we were frightened. We ran 
up the path and we did not stop until we were almost 
at our cottage. 

“Gee!” I said then. “We did it! We’ve got him! 
But what are we going to do about it? ” 

“Do?” said Wampus. “We’ll get Mr. Edwin 
Skreever and Orpheus Cadwallader and have Or¬ 
pheus take his shotgun, and we’ll have them pry 
off that cover and get your dog. That’s what we’ll 
do.” 

“But Orpheus has gone to town.” 

“Well, we’ll do it in the morning.” 

That would have been all right, too, but just then 
the Bright Star came around the lower end of 
Buffalo Island and steered for the two barges. I 
went cold, I tell you! The only thing I could think 
of doing was to get Mr. Edwin Skreever, so we ran 
to our cottage and called and shouted, but he was 
not there. We guessed he had gone down to town as 
he had threatened to do, maybe, so we ran down the 


ioi 


JIBBY JONES 


path to the barges. The men were already throwing 
off the cables. They were pretty cross, too, because 
they don’t like to work at night, and they wouldn’t 
listen to us. They told us to get away from there and 
they chased us. We had to stand and see the Bright 
Star tow the barges out into the river and away. 
We watched them until they were just dim red and 
green lights far down the river. Then we went back 
to the cottage. 

We were scared, I tell you! We thought maybe 
that man would stay nailed down inside that barge 
until he starved to death and some day his bones 
would be found and we would be arrested and, 
maybe, hung. And then, as if that wasn’t bad 
enough, we saw Mr. Edwin Skreever’s motor-boat 
tied in front of the cottage! He hadn’t gone down 
to town. Then we were scared! Ten times over! 

We sat in the cabin until it was awful late, hoping 
Mr. Edwin Skreever was only out somewhere hunt¬ 
ing Rover, but he did not come. We couldn’t fool 
ourselves. We knew we had nailed May’s bride¬ 
groom inside that barge and sent him down the 
river — nobody could tell how far, perhaps all the 
way to New Orleans! And the wedding was the next 
day! 

Well, it was terrible! We tried to think that we 
had not done anything wrong — that we had only 
tried to keep our dog from being stolen — but it was 
no comfort. About midnight we heard the creak of 
Orpheus Cadwallader’s oars as he rowed home from 

102 


THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER 


town, but that did not comfort us much, either. We 
went to sleep right there in the living-room of the 
cottage, thinking what would happen to us the next 
day when the wedding-time came and there was no 
Mr. Edwin Skreever. I dreamed awful things all 
night, but the worst was a dream about May. She 
was all dressed up in her wedding clothes, with a 
white veil and flowers, and when it came time to be 
married, Mr. Edwin Skreever was not there, so she 
wept and wept. Mother and father were very stern 
and cross, and mother said, “Well, there is no help 
for it; you will have to marry Rover!” so they 
dragged Rover in, yowling and pulling back, and 
father and Mr. Smale held him up on his hind legs 
and then, all of a sudden, Rover gave a big wiggle 
and turned into a pile of rusty nails. Then May 
wept again, and in came Mr. Edwin Skreever, but 
he was nothing but bones — just plain skeleton 
bones. He pointed his bone finger at me and opened 
his bone face and I thought he was going to speak, 
but he didn’t. He let out a noise like Mr. Jack 
Betts's Skittery III. 

That woke me up and, sure enough, I was hearing 
the noise of the Skittery III. It wakened Wampus, 
too, and we went to the door, rubbing our eyes. The 
Skittery III swung in toward our cottage and Mr. 
Jack Betts shut off her power and taxied in. He 
jumped ashore and climbed up the rocks. 

“Hello, young fellows!” he said. “May and your 
folks sent me up; they’ve changed their minds — 

103 


JIBBY JONES 


want you and Skreever to come down right away 
and not wait until noon.” 

“Well — ” I said. “Well; all right.” 

“What’s all the welling about, son?” Mr. Jack 
Betts asked. 

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “ I guess there isn’t 
going to be any wedding. I guess maybe Mr. Edwin 
Skreever won’t be there.” 

“He isn’t here,” said Wampus. 

Then I thought of something. 

“Unless you would be the bridegroom,” I said to 
Mr. Jack Betts. “ I guess May wouldn’t like to get 
all ready for a wedding and not have one. I guess, 
when she’s got her dress and the house all decorated 
and everything — ” 

“My word!” said Mr. Jack Betts, laughing. 
“What are you trying to do? Are you asking me to 
marry your sister?” 

“Yes, sir,” I said. 

“As a substitute? My word!” 

“Well — well— ” I said, and then he laughed 
again. 

“What’s all this about Ed Skreever not being 
here and not being there and not being anywhere?” 
he asked. 

So I told him and Wampus told him. We both 
told him at the same time. We told him how we had 
nailed Mr. Edwin Skreever into the hold of the 
barge “U.S. 420” and sent him down the river. We 
said we were sorry, but maybe the Bright Star 

104 


THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER 


would tow him all the way to New Orleans be¬ 
fore he could get out. We told him the whole 
thing. 

“My word!” he cried, when he could stop laugh¬ 
ing. “My word! I wouldn’t have missed this for a 
million dollars; no, not for two million! For eight 
million dollars I would let the stuck-up fellow stay in 
the barge. I would for ten million dollars, anyway. 
But, no! I like May too much. We can’t have May 
‘waiting at the church.’ ” 

“ It isn’t going to be at the church,” I said. “ It is 
going to be at our house.” 

Mr. Jack Betts looked at me then. 

“George,” he said, “you are wonderful! You are 
just wonderful — no other word for it! Come on, 
you two boys; we’ll go get that interned bride¬ 
groom.” 

Well, that was the only time I ever rode in the 
Skittery III, and I don’t know whether I want to 
ride in her again or not. I was scared every inch of 
the way — every single inch. It was like being shot 
out of a gun or something. Mr. Jack Betts certainly 
could make the Skittery III go! We skittered down 
the river and were past the town before I caught my 
breath and we were miles below town before I could 
breathe my breath after I caught it, and then there 
was the Bright Star lazying along twelve miles below 
town and Mr. Jack Betts shut off his gas and slid up 
alongside and told the captain what he had come for. 
The captain shouted to the pilot and he jingled a bell 

105 


JIBBY JONES 


and the Bright Star backed water and half a dozen 
hands ran forward over the willows and pried off the 
hatch cover and out came Rover and Mr. Edwin 
Skreever. 

"A nice business!” Mr. Edwin Skreever said 
bitterly. “A fine hole to be in! I’ll smell of tar all the 
rest of my days. But you young rascals will suffer for 
this — I promise you that!” 

We thought we would, too. 

"Oh, no, now, Edwin!” Mr. Jack Betts said. 
"Come, now! That’s no way to talk on your merry 
wedding morn. These boys meant no harm. Just 
forget it!” 

"I’ll not!” Mr. Edwin Skreever said, even more 
bitterly. 

"Well, of course,” said Mr. Jack Betts cheerfully, 
" I appreciate your feelings, but this boat of mine — 
this Skittery III — is such a peculiar boat. She 
won’t carry any but forgetful people. I did hope you 
were forgetful, Edwin, so I could take you aboard 
and skitter you back to town in a couple of minutes. 
But if you really want to stay on this barge — ” 

For a minute Mr. Edwin Skreever scowled at us 
all, and then he grinned. 

"All right! I’ve forgotten,” he said. 

We made a pretty heavy load for the Skittery III, 
but she skittered up past the town and up to Birch 
Island in no time at all. Then Mr. Edwin Skreever 
packed his things and Mr. Jack Betts skittered away 
and Mr. Edwin Skreever and Wampus and I went 

106 


THE ABDUCTION OF ROVER 


down to town in the motor-boat. Rover rode on the 
stern seat. 

When we went up to our house, May was standing 
at the gate looking for us. She waved her hand as 
soon as she saw us, and when we reached the gate 
she took Mr. Edwin Skreever’s hand and said some 
soft stuff to him, and then she said: 

“And you didn’t forget Rover, did you, Edwin?” 

“No,” he said, “I didn’t forget him. And I don’t 
believe I ever will.” 

But you can see why I felt scared when it seemed 
likely that the red-headed man with the scar over 
his eye in the Arkansas jail was the Red-Headed 
Bandit. Because we knew the Red-Headed Bandit 
was a mighty hard character. Of course, when you 
come to think of it, he did not steal Rover, but he 
might have stolen him if he had thought of it and 
had wanted a dog like Rover. 


CHAPTER X 

THE TREASURE HUNT 


The night after we had chased the Tough Customer 
and the Rat from Birch Island we had a meeting 
of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Explo¬ 
ration Company in the shaft-house of the Five 
Friends’ Worm Mine. The Worm Mine was some¬ 
thing we had started a few days earlier. 

Everybody knows it is hardly worth while going 
fishing unless you have worms or minnows for bait. 
Minnows are the best bait, but they are hard to get 
and harder to keep, so nearly everybody uses worms. 
When everything is moist, you can dig worms al¬ 
most anywhere on the island, but, when a dry spell 
comes on, the ground gets drier and drier, and the 
worms go down so deep that you can dig for an 
hour out back of the cottages and not get a worm. 
Then there is only one place on the island where you 
can get worms. That is in what we all called Mos¬ 
quito Hollow. This year the worms went deep, and 
we had to try Mosquito Hollow for them. 

Jibby was with us when we said we guessed we 
would have to try Mosquito Hollow for worms, and 
the minute we said it he sat down on a log of drift¬ 
wood and closed his eyes and laid his finger alongside 
of his nose. 

108 


THE TREASURE HUNT 

“What are you doing that for?” Wampus Smale 
asked him. 

“For worms,” Jibby said. 

“Trying to smell where they are?” Wampus 
asked, laughing at him. 

“Maybe so,” Jibby Jones said. “I want to do 
my share when it comes to getting worms, and you 
know I can’t go to Mosquito Hollow. I wonder — ” 

“Why can’t you go to Mosquito Hollow?” Wam¬ 
pus asked. 

“ I might stand it if it wasn’t for my spectacles,” 
Jibby said. “The mosquitoes get in behind my spec¬ 
tacles and I can’t smack them. And then I swell 
up.” 

This was true. Jibby always wore tortoise-shell 
rim spectacles, and he did swell up when a mosquito 
bit him. 

“I’m ashamed to swell so much,” Jibby said, 
“but I can’t help it. I think perhaps my grandchil¬ 
dren won’t, if I ever have any grandchildren, be¬ 
cause the swelling seems to be going out of our 
family. When I get a mosquito bite, it only swells 
as big as a walnut, but father’s and mother’s bites 
swell almost as big as apples, and my grandfather 
used to swell as big as a wash-basin. I don’t know 
how big a mosquito bite would have swelled on 
great-grandfather. But I wonder—” 

“What do you wonder?” Wampus asked. 

“ I was just wondering if you could charm a worm 
by playing it a tune on a flute, the way people charm 

109 


JIBBY JONES 


snakes/’ Jibby said. “If we could, we might get a 
flute and charm some worms until they crawled out 
of their holes, no matter how deep the dry weather 
has sent them. But I never heard of charming 
worms with a flute.” 

We laughed, but Jibby Jones was entirely serious. 
If he had ever heard, or read, of worms being 
charmed, he would have tried it because that was 
the way he was. But he hadn’t. 

“ No,” he said, “ I don’t believe it would work. If 
it would work, Izaak Walton would have written it 
in his fishing book. I’ll have to think of some other 
way.” 

“No, don’t you bother,” Tad said. “We’ll get 
the worms.” 

So then we all said the same thing, because we 
knew how Jibby swelled up when mosquitoes bit 
him. Some folks do and some folks don’t, but Jibby 
does. And Mosquito Hollow is just about the worst 
mosquito place in the world. 

The skeets are bad enough anywhere on Birch Is¬ 
land, because there are billions of them that come 
over from the ponds and sloughs, but in Mosquito 
Hollow it is as if all the mosquitoes in the world had 
gathered together in one place. A hundred skeets 
will get on your hand in a second and all start to bite 
at once. 

Mosquito Hollow is the lowest ground on Birch 
Island and the dampest, and that is why there are 
always worms there, but it is why there are always 

no 


THE TREASURE HUNT 


skeets there, too. It is down near the end of the 
island, below all the real cottages. There is one 
old shack there, about as big as a playhouse, but 
nobody has lived in it for years — too many skeets, 
I guess. All around the hollow, and in it, the nettles 
grow as high as a man’s head and keep out the 
breeze, and the skeets just make it the metropolis of 
the whole skeet world. There are not so many in 
early spring, but by summer there are trillions of 
quadrillions, and the noise they make sounds like a 
sawmill. 

“Don’t you bother, Jibby,” I said. “We’ll get 
worms for all of us.” 

So Jibby went with us down the path along the 
river, but, when we got down near the old shack, he 
sat down on an elm root to think how to get worms 
without getting mosquito-bit, and the rest of us 
went back in through the nettles to get the worms. 
It was only a few yards, but the minute we got to 
the low ground the skeets were at us. All of us be¬ 
gan slapping our necks and faces and hands and 
arms and whacking at our backs and ankles and 
legs, and jumping around and waving our arms. 

We had our spades and tin cans and Wampus 
rammed the blade of his spade into the ground and 
then yelled and began slapping himself everywhere. 
Tad grabbed the handle of the spade and pushed 
down on it and turned up a chunk of soil, and then 
he began yelling and slapping himself. I kicked the 
clod of dirt with my foot and picked up one fat worm 

III 


JIBBY JONES 


and put it in the can, and then I yelled and began to 
slap myself. And Skippy did not even pick up a 
single worm; he just yelled and slapped and then 
ran for the riverbank full tilt, dragging his spade 
after him, and we all followed him. It was no use; 
the skeets were too fierce, we couldn’t stand them. 

Jibby Jones was sitting just where we left him, 
and we began scratching our ankles and rubbing 
our necks and faces and the backs of our hands, and 
saying, “Gee!” and “Whew!” and “Oh, boy!” on 
account of the bites. 

“I’ve been waiting for you to come back,” Jibby 
Jones said. 

“ Well, we came back,” I said. “ I guess we didn’t 
stay long enough for you to get homesick for us, did 
we?” 

“I didn’t notice,” Jibby said. “I’ve been think¬ 
ing. I think a person ought to think when he hasn’t 
anything else to do. I was thinking about fishworms, 
and I thought it wasn’t fair for you fellows to do all 
the work and get all the worms when I am going to 
use some of them.” 

“Hah!” Wampus said. “I guess there aren’t 
going to be any worms. I wouldn’t go back to that 
hollow for a million dollars.” 

“Mosquitoes?” asked Jibby. “And, of course 
they are worse for me.” 

“Because you swell up when they bite you,” said 
Tad. 

“Not only that, but there is more of me to bite,” 

112 


THE TREASURE HUNT 


said Jibby. “I got more exposed surface than you 
fellows. More face.” 

That did not seem so, but he proved it was so. 

“On account of my nose,” he said. “Wampus has 
hardly any nose — it is just a nubbin — but my 
nose is like the jib sail of a boat. It is like a big 
triangle sticking out from my face. If you measure 
across Wampus’s face, you’ve got all the surface 
mosquitoes can get at, because his nose doesn’t 
amount to much, but, when you measure across my 
face and come to the nose, you’ve got to measure my 
nose, too. You’ve got to measure the base and alti¬ 
tude and hypotenuse of my nose on one side, and 
then measure the base and altitude and hypotenuse 
of the other side of my nose, and it amounts to a lot. 
The mosquitoes have a whole lot more nose to bite 
on me than on any of the rest of you.” 

We saw that was true and we said so. 

“So I thought I had better think of a way to get 
all the fishworms we need without getting mosquito- 
bit,” said Jibby, “and I did.” 

“How?” I asked him. 

“Well,” said Jibby, “the best way is to have a 
worm mine and mine for them.” 

“ Mine for them! ” Skippy yelled, laughing. “You 
go back into that hollow and try to mine! I dare 
you! ’ ’ 

“I wouldn’t want to do that,” Jibby said, as 
solemn as an owl. “I didn’t think of doing that. I 
thought of mining in the old shack over yonder. It 

113 


JIBBY JONES 


has a dirt floor and it has screens over the windows 
and at the door. I thought we could go into the 
shack and close the screen door and sink a shaft 
there, and then tunnel out under Mosquito Hollow 
and get the worms. I don’t suppose a worm cares 
whether you dig down to get him or tunnel up under 
him to get him. I never heard so.” 

Well, of course, Jibby was joking about whether 
worms cared how we got them, but as soon as he 
mentioned a worm mine, we all wondered why we 
had never thought of one. When you come to think 
of it, a worm mine is the only sensible way to get 
worms from a place where the mosquitoes practi¬ 
cally eat you alive. You are down under the ground 
where the skeets can’t get at you, and you are down 
where the biggest and best worms are, and you have 
your mine, and any time you need fishworms you 
can go into the mine and dig a little worm-ore and 
get the worms out of it. 

Almost before Jibby was through talking, we were 
making a rush for the old shack. The screens were 
fair to middling at the door and windows — good 
enough, anyway, even if they were rusty — and in a 
minute Tad had marked out the size of the shaft we 
ought to sink. He scratched it on the hard earth of 
the floor with his spade. But Jibby wasn’t there 
with us. We were so excited that we did not notice, 
at first, that he was not with us, but about the time 
when we began to try to dig the hard earth of that 
floor he came in bringing a regular ditch-digger’s 

114 


THE TREASURE HUNT 


pick. It was just what we needed. Jibby always did 
think of everything. 

Well, the worm mine was a big success. We took 
turns digging the shaft, some of us digging and some 
of us looking for worms in the dirt we dug out and 
some of us carrying the dirt out of the shack and 
dumping it. The dirt we got out of the shaft was 
pay-dirt, but it did not assay very heavy in worms; 
it was low-grade ore and the worms ran small to 
middling. 

We talked a good deal while we worked, and we 
decided to call the mine the Five Friends’ Worm 
Mine. We got so interested in mining worms and in 
making it a first-class mine that we forgot all about 
fishing. It was bully to think that we were probably 
the first worm miners the world ever knew, and that 
this was the only worm mine in the world. So, from 
then on, whenever we wanted worms, we went down 
to the shack and mined some. And that was what 
the Five Friends’ Worm Mine was, and that old 
shack was the “shaft-house” where we met to talk 
over the plans of the Land Pirate’s Treasure- 
Hunting and Exploration Company. 

We began planning while it was daylight, but be¬ 
fore we were through we had lighted our lanterns. 

First of all, Jibby unpinned the map from inside 
his hat and spread it out on the bottom of an old tin 
bucket. If the paper wasn’t old, it looked old, and 
was stained and yellow. The whole map wasn’t 
much bigger than my hand. First, we looked at the 

115 


JIBBY JONES 


back of it, and there was the word “Riverbank” 
written as plain as could be. Then Jibby turned the 
map over. We all leaned over and looked at it. 

The map was exactly as the Tough Customer had 
explained it to the Rat. There was the river marked 
“ river,’’ and the slough, and the creek emptying into 
the slough, and the crossroads, and the house, and 
the “X” where the treasure was probably buried, 
and the arrow pointing north. There was the “2-3 
miles” and the “Greenland.” 

“That’s it, all right!” Wampus said. “That’s 
just about the way the creek comes into Greenland 
Slough, and just about the way Greenland Slough 
comes into the river. And look where the ‘X’ is. 
A straight line across the back of the square that 
stands for the house would go right spang to that 
‘ X. ’ That’s where the treasure is, sure! Unless it is 
where the head of the arrow points, where the creek 
crosses the road.” 

Jibby drew a deep, solemn breath, if you can call a 
breath solemn. He looked at us with something like 
awe in his eyes. 

“Boys,” he said, “this is the real map! Whoever 
drew it, and whatever it was drawn for, this is a real 
land pirate map. Because that’s not an arrow. 
That’s a pine tree — a signal pine tree; that’s a John 
A. M’rell signal pine!” 

As soon as Jibby said it, we all wondered why we 
hadn’t known it from the first minute. It looked like 
a pine tree, once anybody said so, and it was in the 

116 


THE TREASURE HUNT 


corner of the lot, where all the John A. Murrell sig¬ 
nal pines were. 

We were all excited, and we wished it was the next 
day, so we could get to hunting the treasure, but 
Jibby Jones just stared at the map and turned it one 
way and another. By and by he said: 

“Have any of you ever been up there at Green¬ 
land ?” 

We all had, and we told him so. He asked what 
the store and post-office were like, and we told him 
the store was the post-office, and that it was an old 
frame building, painted white, with a big porch in 
front and a roof over the porch, and usually some 
boxes and barrels on the porch. Close back of the 
store was a shed, open toward the store, where some 
lumber, and lime in barrels, and cement in bags, and 
drain tile, and bales of hay, and barrels of salt, and 
so on, were stored. And alongside of the shed was a 
big red barn, with old wagons and empty boxes and 
barrels and the usual store litter scattered in the 
yard the three buildings made. 

“The shed and the barn don’t show on the map,” 
Jibby said. 

“ No. Maybe they were built later, after the map 
was made,” Skippy said, and Jibby thought that 
might be so. 

“I’ve been thinking how we want to go at this 
job,” he said. “ It seems to me we want to go up the 
river in the motor-boat, and up the slough until we 
come to the mouth of the creek. Then we’ll leave the 

ii 7 


JIBBY JONES 


motor-boat and tramp up the creek. When we come 
to where the creek crosses the road that runs down 
toward the slough, one of us will go up the road, and 
the others will continue up the creek to about where 
the ‘X’ mark is on the map. If I’m the one that goes 
up the road, I’ll stop when I come to the rear end of 
the Greenland store, so I can sight along the end of 
-it. Then, when you come to about where the ‘X’ 
mark is, one of you stand a spade straight up. I’ll 
sight along the rear of the store and motion to the 
left with my hand if the spade is too far to the right, 
or to the right if the spade is too far to the left. That 
way you’ll find the exact spot.” 

That was fine; nobody but Jibby Jones would 
have thought of it. So we decided we would do it 
that way. 

The next morning we tuned up Wampus’s motor- 
boat and saw that she had gas, and each of us got a 
lunch, and we started for Greenland Slough bright 
and early. We had spades and an old pickaxe, and a 
good stout gunnysack to put the treasure in. The 
sun was bright and the river just a little choppy 
with a brisk cool breeze, and it was all fine and ex¬ 
citing and glorious. The boat went along at a good 
speed, and before long we were running close to the 
shore on the Illinois side just below the mouth of 
Greenland Slough. 

Jibby took the map out of his hat and looked 
at it. 

This is all right, he said. “Now we know the 

118 


THE TREASURE HUNT 


only thing about this map we didn’t know before. 
Now we know what these criss-cross scribble marks 
below the mouth of the slough mean. They mean 
swamp. It’s as if whoever made the map had said, 
‘If you come for the treasure, don’t land here, it’s 
swamp.’ ” 

So we swung into the slough and ran up toward the 
mouth of the creek, and the first thing we saw was 
smoke. It came from one of the banks of the creek, 
but the fire it came from was hidden by willows. It 
wasn’t until we reached the creek that we saw a skiff 
fastened to one bank of the creek, and on the shore 
close by a fire with a tin pail hung over it, and the 
Tough Customer and the Rat sitting on a log eating 
out of a pan. 

The minute they saw us, they jumped up, and 
the Tough Customer grabbed a spade and the Rat 
grabbed a club. Wampus swung the motor-boat out 
toward the middle of the slough and we went by and 
on up the slough. 

“What do you know about that!” Skippy said. 
“They’re here already!” 

We could hear them crashing through the willows 
and driftwood as they came running along the bank 
of the slough, and Wampus put on a little more 
speed. 

“ Did you see anything that looked like treasure? ” 
Tad asked. 

We hadn’t, any of us. But we hadn’t noticed 
much of anything. 

119 


JIBBY JONES 


“ How far does this slough run before it comes into 
the river again?” Jibby asked. 

We told him three or four miles, and that the 
motor-boat could get through to the river that 
way, because this slough was not dammed at the 
head. 

“Speed up, Wampus,” Jibby said. “We will get 
out into the river, and hasten back down below the 
mouth of the slough, and below the swamp. Can we 
walk back to the hills below the swamp?” 

We all thought so, although we had never tried it, 
so we ran on up the slough and out into the river, 
and chugged back to where the swamp below the 
slough ended. We left the motor-boat there and 
struck inland. 

It was a tough trip. First, we had to climb five or 
six feet of steep mud bank, and that brought us to a 
thicket of willows and weeds and trees and grape¬ 
vines that we had to fight through inch by inch, 
pushing them aside and climbing over and dodging 
under. Then this opened onto a blind slough — a 
slough that closed at both ends when the river fell 
in the spring ■— and we had to work down-river a 
half-mile or so until we came to a place where there 
was no water and the surface of the mud had dried 
and cracked into big bent cakes. We crossed there 
and fought through more thicket and came out into 
a forest of water-maples and water-elms. The river 
had been over this in the spring, and there was half 
a mile or so of stinging nettles, shoulder high, and 

120 


THE TREASURE HUNT 


great rifts of driftwood. We couldn’t walk in a 
straight direction more than twenty feet at a time; 
we had to go around piles of driftwood, or around 
mud holes, or pools, or places where the ground 
was like mush. Forty times we went in over the 
tops of our shoes, but by and by we came to a huge 
big cornfield that had been planted after the water 
had fallen. We walked between the rows of corn, 
and as we went the land got higher and higher until 
it began to slant up fairly steep, and then the corn¬ 
field ended and we were at the foot of the hills. 

The hills here rounded upward and were grassy 
and not very bad walking, and we got to the top. 
We were just back of a farmhouse, and we edged 
along the farm fence, up-river toward the Greenland 
crossroad, and then struck inland until we hit the 
hilltop road. We walked along that until we came 
to the Greenland store. 

Right away we saw that the map did not exactly 
jibe with the things we saw. In the first place, the 
store was not as far back from the crossroad as the 
map showed it to be; it was so close to the crossroad 
that you could step off the porch into the road. And 
there was no signal pine there, because there was no 
room for one. We sat down by the side of the road to 
have a look at the map. 

Jibby left us there looking at the map while he 
walked down the crossroad. In a couple of minutes 
he came back. 

“ Well,” he said, “ this isn’t a road at all. It is just 

121 


JIBBY JONES 


a sort of driveway alongside of this store, and, as 
soon as it dips down the hill, it ends in a swampy 
pasture, and beyond the pasture the hill drops so 
sharply that no road could go down it, and no road 
ever did go down it. And I’ll tell you another thing. 
Every nail in every board in this store is a wire nail, 
and there were no wire nails in 1835. This isn’t the 
place. This store has been built since then. We’ve 
got to go farther up the hill road.” 

“Why?” Wampus asked. “Maybe the place is 
back in the direction we came from.” 

“No, because the ‘X’ mark was on the creek, and 
we haven’t crossed the creek yet. We’ll go on up the 
road until we come to the creek.” 

We were pretty tired, but we went on up the road. 
We went about half a mile before we came to the 
creek. It went under the road through a big tile cul¬ 
vert almost the size of a man. But there was no 
crossroad anywhere near there, and no house, and 
no sign of a pine tree. There was a barbed-wire fence 
and a cornfield where the house and the tree should 
have been. 

“No good!” I said. 

But Jibby Jones had spread himself flat on the 
ground alongside the barbed-wire fence, and he 
hunched along until he was against the lowest wire, 
almost, and then he held it as high as he could and 
hunched under. He got up and disappeared in the 
cornfield, and we sat down and waited. A farmer 
drove by, and asked us if we were after woodchucks 


122 


THE TREASURE HUNT 

when he saw our spades, but he didn’t wait for an 
answer. 

And then we heard Jibby Jones, off in the corn¬ 
field, calling “Hi-hoo! Hi-hoo!” and we hunched 
under the barbed wire and hurried through the 
corn to where he was. 


CHAPTER XI 

WHERE IS GREENLAND? 

There was no doubt in our minds what Jibby Jones 
had found when we pushed through the corn and 
came to where he was. The corn grew close up to its 
edges, but it was a cellar, as plain as anything could 
be. The cellar wall had been made of creek stones, 
piled up, and it had mostly crumbled inward, half 
filling the cellar and, on top of the stones, brush and 
trash, and old tin boilers and tin cans, and a couple 
of bedsprings and some old rusted barbed wire had 
been dumped, but there were four or five ends of 
squared logs, burned down to the ends, and we 
guessed what had happened to that house — it had 
burned down. 

The cellar was small, not over ten feet square, and 
we judged the house had been small — maybe an old 
log cabin and maybe not — but it had been a house, 
and it was near the creek and near the hill road, and 
it was the only sign of a house Jibby had been able 
to find. 

“I couldn’t find the crossroad, nor a sign of it,” 
Jibby said. “And there’s no sign of a signal pine. 
But over yonder is the creek, and this must have 
been the house, if the whole map wasn’t just a fake 
and a fooler. This is the only place that could be 
Greenland.” 


124 


WHERE IS GREENLAND? 


“Well,” I said, “away back in the good steam¬ 
boat days there was a lot more Greenland than this 
is. Only it wasn’t up here on the hill; it was down at 
the bottom of the hill and over toward the river. I’ve 
heard folks talk about it more than once, because in 
those days Greenland was bigger than Riverbank — 
it had ten or twelve houses and Riverbank had only 
eight or nine — and Greenland thought it was going 
to be the biggest city west of New York. The 
steamers stopped here for wood, because they all 
burned wood. But when coal came, the big steamers 
stopped coming here, and then the railroad went 
down the other side of the river, and Greenland 
busted. There wasn’t any more Greenland.” 

So Jibby got out the map again and studied it. 

“ I don’t think this is the place,” he said suddenly. 

“Why not, Jibby?” we asked him. 

“Come here and I’ll show you,” he said. 

He walked straight down a corn row to the place 
where the corn ended and the ground fell off sudden 
into the creek. 

“Does that look like a place to hide treasure or 
anything else?” he asked, and we said it did not. 
“Then count my steps,” he said. 

He paced off, taking as long steps as he could, the 
distance to the ruined cellar, and it made fifty paces. 

“Now,” he said, “on this map the house is about 
halfway between the creek and the road. The road 
ought to be fifty paces west of the house. Count my 
steps.” 


125 


JIBBY JONES 


He paced off fifty steps. 

“This is where the pine tree ought to be, but it 
isn’t here,” he said. “But we won’t worry about 
that; it may have been cut down and the roots 
grubbed up. But if there was ever a road here, 
where the map says it was, it ought to run east of 
north. That would be in this direction.” 

He led us through the corn in the direction the 
map showed the road should have gone. Nothing 
but corn! So we came to the edge of the hill, looking 
off over the bottomland and the slough and the river. 
We saw in a minute that no road could have gone 
down that hill — it was so steep you might call it a 
bluff. Jibby pulled out the map and showed it to us. 

“Look where the creek runs on the map, back of 
the house,” he said. “ It was fifty paces from the side 
of the house to the creek, and by the map it would be 
about fifty paces to the creek from the back of the 
house, because the creek turns and runs back of the 
house. Where is your creek?” 

Well, there was no creek! If that creek had run 
where the map said it ran, it would have had to bal¬ 
ance itself in the air ten paces out beyond the edge 
of the hill. 

“All very well! ” said Jibby. “ Now look down be¬ 
low there. Follow the creek from where it comes 
down the hill to where it goes into the slough.” 

We saw our mistake then, or thought we did. The 
turn of the creek was not up on the hill at all; it was 
down there in the bottomland. We could trace it as 

126 


WHERE IS GREENLAND? 


plain as day, because it was edged thick with wil¬ 
lows. And, as we stood there looking at the place 
where the creek made its turn toward the west, we 
heard a noise of “chuck! chuck! chuck!” It was a 
spade chucking into soft soil. The Tough Customer 
and the Rat were there ahead of us! 

Well, there wasn’t anything for us to do but go 
home and let our treasure-hunting go for that day. 
We couldn’t go down there and fight the Tough 
Customer and the Rat, and we had no right to, be¬ 
cause they had got to the place first. And we would 
not have fought them, anyway. A bunch of boys 
can’t drive away two desperate characters in any 
such way. So we sat on the hill awhile and listened 
to the Tough Customer and the Rat digging away, 
and then we got up and started for home. And it 
was time, anyway, because we had that long fight 
through the bottomland to get back to our motor- 
boat. 

On the way back to the boat we talked a lot about 
what we could do and what we couldn’t do, and we 
rested a lot and fooled around a lot, and the sun was 
getting low when we got back to the boat. And the 
first glance at the boat showed that some one had 
been there; some one had whacked the motor with 
an axe or a spade until it looked mighty much like a 
heap of junk. 

“The Tough Customer!” Wampus said, as mad 
as a hatter, and we all thought the same, but there 
was no way to prove it. The only thing we could do 

127 


JIBBY JONES 


was to get into the boat and shove it into the cur¬ 
rent and float down home the best we could, urging 
the boat toward our shore with the oars. It was dark 
when we got home, and we were mighty tired and 
hungry, and the first person we saw was Wampus’s 
father. He was standing on the ripraps waiting for 
us. 

“About time!” he said. ”1 came up with Parcell 
and I’ve been waiting two hours for you to get home 
so you could run me back to town. What’s the mat¬ 
ter with the boat?” 

“It’s busted,” Wampus said. 

“Can’t you fix it?” his father asked. 

“No; it’s too badly busted,” Wampus told him. 
“It’ll have to be mended down in town. I guess 
maybe it’ll cost thirty or forty dollars.” 

Mr. Smale did not like that a bit. 

“ Very well, my son! ” he said. “If that’s the case, 
that boat will remain ‘busted’ until you earn the 
money to have it mended. I’ve paid for repairing 
that boat as many times as I intend to. You are old 
enough to take care of that boat properly now, and 
it is your property. I’m through with it.” 

We all felt pretty sick. There wasn’t much use 
thinking of doing more treasure-hunting unless we 
had the motor-boat to go up-river in. 

Jibby was the first to say anything as we walked 
toward our cottages. 

“It appears to me,” he said in his solemn way, 
“that it is not right to let Wampus pay for repairing 

128 


WHERE IS GREENLAND? 


that boat. The boat was being used by the Land Pi¬ 
rate Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company, 
and the Company ought to pay for the repairs.” 

“Sure!” I said, laughing. “ And how much money 
has the Company got to pay with?” 

We counted up, and we had three dollars and 
sixty-seven cents. The part of it I had was the seven 
cents. 

“I didn’t mean exactly that,” Jibby said. “I 
meant that the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and 
Exploration Company ought to earn the money to 
pay for repairing the boat.” 

“By finding treasure?” I asked, as sarcastic as 
anything. 

“Why, no,” Jibby said, without a smile. “I did 
not mean that. I was thinking the Land Pirate’s 
Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company might 
mine the Five Friends’ Worm Mine and get the 
money that way.” 

You couldn’t beat Jibby Jones when it came to 
thinking of things. 


CHAPTER XII 

THE WORM MINE 

The next morning we all went down to the shaft- 
house, which was the old shack near Mosquito Hol¬ 
low, and set to work in the worm mine. Jibby’s idea 
was that we should mine some first-class worms and 
then set a trot-line in the river and bait it with the 
worms, and twice a day we would “run” the trot¬ 
line and get the fish. Then we would sell the fish to 
our folks and to the other families on our island. 
And, every day when we were not running the trot¬ 
line, we would be catching fish with poles, and we 
would sell those fish, too. And before the summer 
was over, we would, maybe, have enough money to 
have Wampus’s motor-boat mended. 

Well, I don’t know how that would have worked 
out, because we did not raise the money that way. 
We got it by solving the mystery of the stolen cider 
that we had heard the Rat talking to the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer about. But the credit belongs to Jibby Jones 
— I guess you will see that. 

It was Skippy Root’s father that offered the re¬ 
ward, because the barrels were his barrels. They had 
been stolen from his wholesale grocery house down 
in Riverbank. 

The reward was twenty-five dollars, and there 
was something funny about the whole business, and 

130 


THE WORM MINE 


my father and Mr. Root and Mr. Smale, and Tad’s 
father and Mr. Jones knew the joke and laughed 
about it a lot up on Birch Island where we were 
spending the summer, but they did not tell us or 
anybody. The notice in the paper only said, “$25 
Reward for information leading to the recovery of 
five barrels stolen from the Root Wholesale Gro- 
% eery,” or something like that. But I’ll tell you 
what the joke was. We found out later on. 

One of the things Mr. Root sold in his wholesale 
grocery was cider — sweet cider — and he sold it by 
the barrel, but he had five barrels of sweet cider that 
turned hard while it was in his grocery cellar, and it 
was against the law to sell hard cider or to have it 
around, so he thought he had better get rid of it. He 
didn’t want to go to jail. Nobody does, I guess. 

So one day Mr. Root went out onto the platform 
back of his grocery and he said to his truck-driver: 

“Joe, I’ve got five barrels of cider in the cellar 
that has turned hard, and I want to get rid of it. I 
want you to haul those five barrels down to the river 
to-morrow and empty that hard cider into the river 
and bring the barrels back. I don’t want any hard 
cider around here.” 

“All right, Mr. Root,” Joe said; “I’ll do it to¬ 
morrow.” 

Well, that was all right, but it happened that 
there were a lot of men in the alley near the 
platform just then, standing around and looking at a 
trained bear an Italian had, and one of them must 

131 



JIBBY JONES 


have heard Mr. Root and wanted hard cider, for 
that night the grocery cellar was broken into and 
five barrels were stolen out of it. But the joke was 
that the thief did not get the five barrels of hard 
cider; he got five barrels of molasses. He made a 
mistake. He took the molasses and left the hard 
cider. So the next day Joe dumped out the cider 
and Mr. Root offered a reward for the molasses. 
But nobody came for the reward, and it looked as if 
all that molasses was gone forever. And the thing 
Mr. Root and father and all the men laughed about 
was how surprised the thieves would be when they 
broached a barrel to have a good drink of hard cider 
and found it was molasses. They thought the 
thieves would be pretty badly surprised and scared, 
because, instead of taking five barrels of cider that 
Mr. Root did not want, they would have taken five 
barrels of molasses he did want. They would be 
mighty worried thieves. 

But nobody found the molasses or caught the 
thieves and everybody forgot all about it. 

We worked inside the shack at first, digging 
deeper and deeper, and we got pretty good worms 
and quite a lot of them. 

“But say!” Wampus said, all of a sudden. “Say! 
Anybody can come into our mine and mine worms; 
we don’t really own it. We don’t know who does 
own this ground down here at this end of the island.” 

Jibby stroked his nose awhile and thought. 

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to find 

132 


THE WORM MINE 


out about that. Mostly, miners can mine wherever 
they want to. The man that owns the land owns the 
surface, but, when a prospector locates a mine and 
sinks his shaft, he can mine anywhere he wants to, 
underground. I don’t know whether a worm miner 
has that right or not. I know it is true of mineral 
mines, but a worm isn’t quite a mineral; it is an ani¬ 
mal. Anyway, I think we had better stake out a 
claim here, because that is what miners always do.” 

So we staked out a claim, stakes at the four cor¬ 
ners, so that it took in the whole of Mosquito Hol¬ 
low. It turned out to be all right, anyway, because 
Skippy’s father owned the shack and the hollow, but 
we felt better when we had our claim staked out. It 
was more regular and like real miners. 

We got the shaft about as deep as we thought it 
needed to be, and the next morning we began to tun¬ 
nel. We aimed the tunnel so it would go under the 
back of the shack toward Mosquito Hollow, be¬ 
cause that was the best worm-bearing ore on the 
island, and, as soon as we began to tunnel, Jibby 
got a saw and a hatchet and some nails and sent some 
of us to get driftwood planks and boards, to use as 
mine timber to shore up the tunnel with. 

Almost as soon as we began to run the tunnel out 
toward Mosquito Hollow, we struck better worm 
ore, and it got better all the time. Out of two spade¬ 
fuls of ore we could refine enough worms to last a boy 
for a whole day’s fishing, even if the white perch 
were stealing his bait as fast as he could put it on the 

133 


JIBBY JONES 


hook. In half an hour after we had begun to tunnel, 
we had enough worms to last the six of us a week. 

“That’s enough,” Jibby said. “We’ll quit now 
and put up a sign on the shack—‘Five Friends’ 
Worm Mine. Keep Out! ’ — and not mine any more 
until we need more worms.” 

I didn’t like that idea; none of us did. Mining 
worms was more fun than fishing or anything else, 
and we all hated to stop, but it was Wampus who 
thought of the big idea. 

“Look here,” he said, leaning on his spade, 
“what’s the use of quitting? We’ve got a worm 
mine here that is the best and only in the world, and 
we’ve got the richest worm ore anybody could ever 
find. It is the driest season for twenty years, and 
worms are harder to get than they ever were. That's 
so, isn’t it?” 

It was, and we all said so. 

“All right, then,” Wampus said, “now is the time 
to mine worms. Now is the time everybody will be 
glad to buy worms. Now is the time when we have 
the only worm mine in existence, but in a week or so 
somebody will hear of the Five Friends’ Worm Mine 
and start another worm mine somewhere, and then 
there will be more and more worm mines started and 
everybody will be selling worms.” 

“Selling them?” said Skippy. 

“Sure!” Wampus said. “ I said ‘selling them’ and 
I mean ‘selling them.’ Why, right here on Birch 
Island, we can sell a can of worms a day to every 

134 


THE WORM MINE 


family on the island. How many? Twenty families? 
And some will need two cans. Say twenty-four cans 
a day. And, leaving out Sundays, there are about 
sixty-five days that the families are up here — that 
makes one hundred and thirty dozen cans of worms 
for the season. If we only got ten cents a can, that 
would be one hundred and fifty-six dollars.” 

“Ten cents a can for worms like these!” ex¬ 
claimed Tad, holding up a big one. “They are worth 
a cent apiece! If we put one hundred in a can we 
ought to get a dollar a can.” 

“That would be one thousand and fifty-six dol¬ 
lars, then,” Wampus said. “And only for what we 
sell on this island. Oh, boy! And think of how many 
people go fishing from town who don’t spend the 
summer on this island — hundreds!” 

“From town?” Skippy cried. “What do you say 
‘from town’ for? From all up and down the old 
Mississippi! From all over the United States, every¬ 
where! Yes, and in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, 
and South America people go fishing, don’t they? If 
we are going to sell worms ...” 

11 Canned ones,' ’ I said, * 1 packed in cans with holes 
in the lids, like pepper-boxes, so the worms can 
breathe.” 

We were all getting excited — all except Jibby 
Jones. All Jibby said was: 

“Aluminum cans, because, if there are holes in the 
lids and the earth in the cans is moist, cans made of 
tin would rust.” 


135 


JIBBY JONES 


“And, anyway,” said Wampus, jumping at that 
idea quick, “aluminum cans would be better than 
tin; they would be lighter to ship and lighter for 
fishermen to carry. When we get to shipping tons 
and tons of worms, the difference in the weight of the 
cans will save us hundreds of dollars in freight. And 
I say we ought to have a special can with a wire 
handle, like a lard pail, only smaller, so boys could 
carry cans of our worms easily when they go fishing.” 

“Sure! Of course, we’ll do that,” I said, “and we 
ought to have a patent lid — one that will come off 
and fit on again, like the lid of a baking-powder 
can.” 

“And with letters stamped on it,” said Skippy. 
“It ought to be stamped ‘Five Friends’ Mine — 
Best Quality Fishing Worms — Riverbank, Iowa.’ ” 

“Yes,” said Wampus, “when they were our best 
quality, but you don’t think we are going to throw 
away all the medium and small worms we get out of 
the mine, do you? No, sir! We’ll have three grades 

Best Quality, Prime Quality, and Family Quality. 
1 hey will be one dollar a can, seventy-five cents a 
can, and fifty cents a can.” 

“Except the half-size and the trial cans,” said 
Tad. 

\ es, and except the pails of bulk worms, as¬ 
sorted,” said Skippy. “We’ve got to have some put 
up that way, and maybe some in kegs and some in 
barrels, for general stores in the places where they 
don t catch anything but goggle-eyes and mud- 

136 


THE WORM MINE 


cats. These would be the cheapest we would sell. 
They would be for stores where boys would come in 
with their own old rusty tomato cans and say, * Say, 
mister, gimme two cents’ worth of fishing worms.’ ” 
Well, we went on planning about the worm mine 
that way for two or three days and we kept right on 
digging the tunnel out under Mosquito Hollow and 
timbering it up. Here and there we ran into sand, 
which has no worms in it, and then we shifted the 
direction of the tunnel a little. Jibby said the proper 
way was to follow the worm-veins wherever they 
went. 


CHAPTER XIII 

THE VIKING SHIP 

In a little while we had every old tin can on the is¬ 
land filled with worms and choice crumbly black 
earth in which they would be well and hearty and 
feel comfortable and at home. Then we began filling 
old pails, and wash-pitchers with the handles off, 
and boxes, and were fussing a little about who would 
go on the road and travel from town to town selling 
worms for the Five Friends’ and taking winter 
orders for spring delivery. We decided that Jibby 
would be the best salesman because he looked seri¬ 
ous-minded and truthful with his big nose and tor¬ 
toise-shell rimmed spectacles, but we decided he 
would have to wear a brand-new suit of clothes and 
carry a cane. 

We decided that the Best Quality Five Friends’ 
worms should have a label with a black bass on it, 
and that the Prime Quality label should have a pick¬ 
erel picture, and the Family Quality a picture of a 
perch or a goggle-eye. We decided all those de¬ 
tails. Skippy wanted to have “None genuine with¬ 
out this signature ” printed on the label, but we gave 
that up because there were five of us and it would 
crowd the label to have five signatures; and Wampus 
wanted to advertise in all the magazines and on the 

138 


THE VIKING SHIP 


billboards and in all the street-cars, but we did not 
decide to do it. We decided to let that wait a while. 

Jibby did not talk much. He dug and picked 
worms and timbered the gallery and carried out 
dirt, but something was bothering him. We thought 
he would mention it when he got ready, but he 
didn’t, so we asked him. 

“Water,” he said. “I’m worrying about water. 
What are we going to do if the mine floods?” 

“If the mine floods?” Wampus said, stopping 
work. 

We all stopped work and looked at Jibby, because 
we all knew that a flooded mine is a dead mine and 
can’t be worked until pumps are rigged up and the 
water pumped out. And nearly every spring the 
whole lower end of Birch Island is flooded, and it 
is a rare spring when Mosquito Hollow is not. Just 
about as sure as spring came, our whole mine would 
be under water. 

“But that’s not what worries me,” Jibby said. 
“ It is these streaks of sand we have run into here and 
there. The whole island won’t have to be flooded to 
flood our mine; as soon as the water in the river rises 
a little, it will begin to seep through that sand and 
flood the mine. Then our mine is gone. No more 
worm mining.” 

Well, the flood came, but not in the way we ex¬ 
pected. Wampus was working at the end of the tun¬ 
nel one day, digging out worm ore with his pick, and 
Tad and Skippy were carrying it to the shaft, and 

139 


JIBBY JONES 


me and Jibby were hoisting it up in baskets and re¬ 
fining the worms out of it, when Wampus shouted to 
us that he had struck a tree-trunk. He shouted back 
through the tunnel to us that it was right across the 
tunnel and that he would have to have an axe to 
chop it away, or he would have to tunnel around it. 

The tunnel was just about big enough for two 
boys to crawl through on hands and knees together, 
so Tad took our electric torch and crawled in. He 
and Wampus scraped more dirt away, and then 
came crawling out, and you bet they were excited. 

“ It ain’t a tree-trunk at all,” Tad said. “ It’s the 
side of a boat — an oak boat — and it is bound with 
iron bands, and I’ll bet I know what it is. It’s an old 
viking ship. It’s a great find! I’ll bet we can dig it 
out and sell it to a museum for a million dollars or 
something.” 

“Sure!” Wampus said. “An old viking ship 
would be worth that. I bet the vikings from Nor¬ 
way or somewhere sailed over to America hundreds of 
years before Columbus did, and discovered the Mis¬ 
sissippi, and got shipwrecked on this island, or maybe 
the Indians killed them, and the river dumped sand 
and dirt on their ship and covered it up and pre¬ 
served it. Who knows the name of a museum that 
would be likely to buy a viking ship?” 

“I do,” said Jibby Jones, “but I wouldn’t spend 
the money you expect to get for that ship yet. No! 
Because I never heard of viking ships sailing up the 
Mississippi.” 


140 


THE VIKING SHIP 


“That makes it all the rarer,” Wampus said. 
“You go in and look at it yourself.” 

So Jibby took the torch and crawled in, and I 
crawled in after him, and Skippy and Tad and Wam¬ 
pus crawled after us. Jibby felt the ship and so did 
I. It was oak, sure enough, and rounded like a ship’s 
hull, but in a minute Jibby laughed. 

“It’s not a ship,” he said; “it’s a barrel. I guess 
it’s an old barrel the river floated in here and cov¬ 
ered up. Give me the pick.” 

I handed him the pick, and Jibby sat back and 
gave the barrel a whack with one of the points of the 
pick, and the pick stuck fast. The point of the pick 
went through the oak of the barrel and stuck in the 
hole it made. So Jibby sort of raised up and put his 
weight on the pick handle and pulled, and all at once 
the whole side of the barrel seemed to give and the 
oak staves cracked and out poured — molasses! 

The first big gush of it went on Jibby and in his 
lap, and then I got my share, and we both shouted 
and scrambled to our hands and knees to get away 
from there, and Skippy and Tad and Wampus did 
not know what had happened, but were plenty fright¬ 
ened and tried to get away, and they got tangled up 
and jammed in the tunnel like a cork down a bottle 
neck, and nobody could get out. Except the mo¬ 
lasses. 

The molasses poured out. In about half a minute 
we were in a regular river of it and all of us covered 
with it. 

141 


JIBBY JONES 


“Go on out! Go on out!” I shouted, and Tad and 
Wampus and Skippy were pushing and pulling each 
other, and shouting, and then I began to laugh. I 
couldn’t help it. It was funny — five of us stuck in 
the molasses like flies. It was the first time I ever 
heard of a mine being flooded with molasses. Then 
we all began to laugh, except Jibby Jones, and he 
said, as solemn as ever: 

“I think we will get the reward.” 

That was like him. Even when he was down in 
a worm mine stuck in a flood of molasses, he was 
always thinking ahead. 

Well, we did get the reward. It turned out that the 
men that stole the barrels of molasses had buried 
them there in Mosquito Hollow, thinking they were 
hard cider. They thought they would leave it there 
until it was safe to take it somewhere and sell it. 

When we went up to the cottages, Wampus’s 
mother was on her porch, and when she saw how 
soiled we were she said: 

“Well! You are a sweet lot, aren’t you!” 

But she didn’t know how sweet we really were. 

Mr. Root laughed and laughed when he saw us 
and heard that we had discovered the stolen molas¬ 
ses, and he paid us the reward and said it was worth 
it to see five boys molassesed up that way, and I 
guess it was. 

We don’t know who did it, but the next morning, 
when we went to the mine to see how bad the wreck 
was, somebody had changed the sign we had put on 

142 


THE VIKING SHIP 


the shack door. It said, now: “Five Sweet Friends* 
Worm and Molasses Mine. Keep Out!” 

With the reward money and what we got for as 
many worms as we sold — which were not very 
many — we had Wampus’s motor-boat mended, 
and the first trip we took in it was up the river. We 
ran into Greenland Slough, and the first thing that 
hit our eyes was that old shanty-boat, and the 
Tough Customer sitting on the narrow deck, fish¬ 
ing in the slough, with a can of worms beside him. 

As the motor-boat came closer, the Rat poked his 
head out of the door of the shanty-boat and began to 
curse and swear like a regular pirate. The Tough 
Customer turned and gave him an ugly look and 
told him to shut up and hold his mouth. Then he 
called to us, and Wampus ran the motor-boat in close. 

“Say, you fellers!” the Tough Customer called. 
“Looky here; I want to talk to you.” 

“Well, what is it?” Wampus asked. 

“I just want to tell you something,” the Tough 
Customer said. “If you got a piece of paper that 
fell off’n this boat when that fat feller whacked the 
end mighty near off’n this boat, you’d better hand 
it over here and now, because me and my pardner 
ain’t going to stand no more foolishness. That’s our 
paper, and, if you don’t hand it over, we’re going to 
have the law on you, and maybe jail you; so hand 
it over while you got the chance.” 

Jibby Jones looked at the Tough Customer 
through his tortoise-shell spectacles. 

143 


JIBBY JONES 


“My gracious!” he said, as solemn as an old owl. 
“ I would not like to be put in jail for stealing! Not 
in some jails, at any rate. What jail would we be 
put in, do you suppose? Do you think it would be 
the one at Helena, Arkansas?” 

The Tough Customer glared at Jibby — that’s 
the only word for it. Then he worked his jaws and 
pointed his finger at Jibby and sputtered, but he 
was so mad he couldn’t say a word, and Jibby 
leaned over and accelerated the motor-boat, and we 
swung around and went scooting down the slough, 
with the exhaust snapping like a machine gun. 

“That’s all right, anyway,” Jibby said. “We 
know one thing; they haven’t found the treasure yet. 
If they had, they wouldn’t care who had the map.” 


CHAPTER XIV 
UNCLE BEESWAX 

Three times after that we went up to Greenland 
Slough, and two of the times we went up the creek, 
because the Tough Customer and the Rat were not 
at the mouth of the creek to guard it. One of the 
times we found them up the creek where they were 
doing their treasure digging, but the third time they 
were nowhere around, and we had a chance to see 
what they had been doing. 

For plain ordinary everyday tramps they had 
done a lot of work, I will say. Nobody could have 
hired them, for day’s wages, to do as much digging 
as they had done. They had dug in eleven places — 
five on one bank of the creek and six on the other — 
and the holes were deep enough to bury oxen in, one 
on top of the other and both standing. They had 
tried one place and then another, and anybody could 
see that they had been puzzled and not sure where 
the cross mark on the map had been. That, we 
guessed, was why they were so anxious to get the 
map. They hadn’t found anything, and they didn’t 
know what to do next. 

And neither did we. As nearly as we could figure 
it out, the Tough Customer and the Rat had dug 
one of their holes right spang on the spot where the 
“X” mark on the map showed that the treasure 

H5 


JIBBY JONES 


should be, if there was any. If they hadn’t found 
anything with all that digging, there wasn’t much 
chance that we would. 

By this time we had got into the second week of 
August, and there was not any too much of vacation 
left. We walked up and down the creek, studying 
the lay of the land, but there was no question that 
the Tough Customer had found the right spot, ac¬ 
cording to the map. There was only one turn in the 
creek toward the west, and that was where they had 
dug. We thought, perhaps, the creek might have 
shifted, but when we walked here and there we saw 
that it hadn’t. It looked hopeless, and we were just 
ready to leave, when we saw a man come loping 
toward us, half doubled up and not wasting a bit 
of time, and after him were the Tough Customer, 
hobbling faster than you would believe a one-legged 
man could hobble, and the Rat. The Rat was mak¬ 
ing good time, too, but he didn’t seem anxious to go 
ahead of the Tough Customer. 

As the man they were after came nearer and saw 
us, he came toward us, and when he had covered a 
few more yards we saw he was the old man every¬ 
body calls “ Uncle Beeswax.” He had an axe and 
two baskets, and by the time he reached us he was 
just about all in. He was so out of breath that 
he couldn’t talk, and it was plain enough he was 
almost too scared to talk, anyway. 

The far side of the creek was five or six feet higher 
than the side we were on. When Uncle Beeswax 

146 


UNCLE BEESWAX 


came up to us and we saw he was being chased, we 
grabbed his axe and baskets and took him by the 
arms and hustled him across the creek and up the 
bank. Maybe we might have hustled on up the hill 
with him, but he was plumb played out. He dropped 
down on the short grass and just panted. 

“No use!” he panted. “Played out! Got to rest 
— got to rest! ’ ’ 

So we let him rest, and we turned and took a look 
at the Tough Customer and his pardner. They had 
stopped about fifty feet away, and were looking at 
us and talking to each other. Whatever they had 
been chasing old Uncle Beeswax for, I guess they 
didn’t like the idea of tackling five husky boys and a 
man, even if he was an old man. So, after a minute 
or two, they sat down and watched us. The Tough 
Customer was pretty well played out himself, 
stumping so far on a wooden leg. 

Now, we all knew Uncle Beeswax, except maybe 
Jibby Jones, and we knew there wasn’t a mean drop 
of blood in him, or any harm. He was one of the 
most aged men any of us knew, and he lived a mile or 
so farther up the river in a shanty-boat of his own, 
and he was all right. He was a little old man, hardly 
as tall as Wampus, and he had a long white beard 
that almost touched the ground. The thing you 
thought of when you saw him was a gnome, the kind 
you see in pictures with a long pointed cap and a pick 
to dig gold with. He made his living mostly by find¬ 
ing bee trees, and selling the honey and beeswax to 

147 


JIBBY JONES 


folks in Riverbank, but he fished some, and along in 
the fall he hunted for wild grapes and sold them for 
about a dollar a bushel, or maybe a dollar and a half. 

We island boys had seen old Uncle Beeswax hun¬ 
dreds of times, but he had always acted solemn and 
severe and fussy and nervous, as if he was afraid we 
would meddle with his skiff or something. Probably 
boys teased him a lot because he was so funny-look¬ 
ing; anyway, he did not like boys. And one of the 
things they teased him about was his nose. He 
hated to be teased about his nose, because he never 
drank a drop, but his nose was as long as Jibby 
Jones’s nose, but thick and bulby and as red as fire. 

So there we were like two armies, we on the high 
ground and the Tough Customer and the Rat on the 
low ground, and each waiting to see what the other 
would do. And presently Uncle Beeswax got his 
breath. 

“Can’t understand it! Can’t understand it!” he 
said, shaking his head so that his long beard wiggled 
back and forth. “Never was chased in my life be¬ 
fore. And they acted like they would kill me, them 
men.” 

“What for?” I asked him. 

“Nothin’!” he said. “Nothin’ at all! I was in 
yonder” — and he pointed toward the swamp be¬ 
low the slough —“a-lookin’ for grape trees, and 
I come out again. The skeeters was too much for 
me — they was eatin’ me alive. And I was tuckered; 
I’m old; I’m mighty old.” 

148 



UNCLE BEESWAX 


“Well, they didn’t chase you because you were 
old, did they?” I asked him, because he stopped 
talking. 

“ I don’t know why they chased me,” he said, as 
if his feelings were hurt that anybody should. “I 
wasn’t doin’ harm. I just sat down on the edge of 
their pesky little shanty-boat to rest my legs, and 
they come at me, yellin’ and shoutin’, and chased 

^ _ > y 

me. 

He made a move to wipe the sweat off his face, and 
when he opened his hand there was a piece of paper 
crumpled in it. 

“Huh!” he said. “There it be, hey? I thought 
I’d lost it, bein’ chased.” 

“What is it?” I asked him. 

He spread it out on his knee. 

“Month or so ago,” he said, “I was speculatin’ 
through the swamp yonder and I come onto a grape 
tree — ’ ’ 

Well, we knew what a grape tree was. A grape 
tree is not a tree that bears grapes the way an apple 
tree bears apples. A grape tree is a tree the wild 
grapevines have climbed over until you can’t see the 
tree and can only see masses and masses of grape¬ 
vine. And one year one of these trees will have 
bushels and bushels of wild grapes, and no other 
grape trees around there will have any. The man 
that can find a good grape tree and get the grapes 
off it is lucky. 

“I come onto this grape tree a month or so ago,” 

149 


JIBBY JONES 


Uncle Beeswax said, “and I made a map showin’ 
whereabouts it was, so I could go back to it when 
the grapes was ripe. And to-day I was tryin’ to find 
it, but I couldn’t. The skeeters got too bad for me 
before I traced to the tree. So I was settin’ on this 
shanty-boat lookin’ at my map I had made —” 

44 And they came up?” Wampus asked. “That’s 
it, then. Those men lost a map, and they want it, 
and they thought you had it. They wanted to get it 
away from you.” 

Uncle Beeswax’s face wrinkled, and we knew he 
was grinning. 

“ If that’s all,” he said, “they can have it. I don’t 
want it. It ain’t no good, noway. I can’t make 
nothing out of it myself, and they can’t neither.” 

So, at that, Skippy Root stood up and yelled at 
the Tough Customer. 

“Hey!” he yelled. “He hasn’t got your map! 
All he’s got is a map of a grape tree. You can see it, 
if you want to.” 

The Tough Customer and the Rat consulted to¬ 
gether, and the Tough Customer came to their side 
of the creek, and Jibby Jones took the map of the 
swamp and grape tree and went over to them and 
showed it to them. It satisfied them that Uncle 
Beeswax did not have their map. So Jibby told 
them, straight and plain, that if anybody had their 
map we had it, and that we meant to keep it. Then 
he asked them if they had found anything. The 
Tough Customer told him it was none of his busi- 

150 


UNCLE BEESWAX 


ness what they had found or what they hadn’t 
found, and then he and the Rat went back toward 
their shanty-boat and Jibby climbed up our bank 
of the creek. Uncle Beeswax had got onto his feet 
again and was going away, but, as Jibby’s head 
came up over the edge of the bank, Uncle Beeswax 
stopped dead short and looked at Jibby and stared 
at him with his mouth wide open. 

“Noble!” he said, when he had stared and stared. 
“Just plumb noble, and there ain’t any other words 
for it! What a nose! What a nose!” 

Now, most folks would have been mad if anybody 
said that, but Jibby Jones wasn’t — he was proud of 
his nose. Jibby talked about his nose more than 
anybody else did, because it was a family relic, or 
something, and had come down to him from his 
Grandfather Parmenter and his Great-Grandfather 
Parmenter and his Great-Great-Grandfather Par¬ 
menter. Some folks are proud of a colonial spinning- 
wheel that has been in the family three hundred 
years, but Jibby was proud of his nose. And I guess 
he was right. A nose is a better relic than a spinning- 
wheel any day; it is handier. It don’t have to be 
dusted, and you can wash it when you are washing 
the rest of your face and save time that way, and 
you can carry it with you wherever you go. You 
have to. So Jibby looked at old Uncle Beeswax and 
grinned. 

“It’s my jib,” he said. “When the wind blows 
too hard, I have to take a couple of reefs in it.” 

I5i 


JIBBY JONES 


Well, I guess Uncle Beeswax didn’t have a chance 
to hear many jokes, and when he heard that one he 
put down his basket and sat down on a stump and 
laughed and laughed. He whacked his leg, and I 
thought he would die, he laughed so hard. 

“Jib, hey?” he chuckled when he could get his 
breath. “Jib, is it? Well, if that’s so you ought to 
have some of my beeswax to waterproof it with. 
Nothing like good old beeswax to keep the weather 
from ruinin’ a jib.” 

Then he went off in another spell of laughing, and 
whacked his leg and the tears rolled down his face 
and got into his beard. 

So Jibby told him all about his nose and how he 
got it from his Grandfather Parmenter and how 
George Washington had complimented Jibby’s 
Great-Great-Grandfather Parmenter on his nose, 
and in a couple of minutes old Uncle Beeswax was as 
chummy as a kid with us and told us all about his 
nose and how useful it was and all the forty or fifty 
things he had used to try to keep it from being so red, 
but no hope. He said it was a headstrong nose and 
if it made up its mind to be red it was bound to be 
red, and no use fooling with it. 

“ If I had two of ’em,” he said, “and the other was 
a green one, I’d look like a steamboat.” 

He showed where he would have his two noses, if 
he had two, one on either cheek. 

“ But one is plenty,” he said. “When a man has a 
nose like mine, or like yours,” he added politely to 

152 


UNCLE BEESWAX 


Jibby, “he has no excuse to covet any more nose. 
He’s got a bountiful supply.” 

He said it all with a twinkle in his eye, and from 
then on he was a good fellow with us. 

We asked him if he knew much about Greenland, 
and he said he had been born in a house right about 
where we were sitting, which would be just about 
where the house was on the treasure map. So we 
asked him if anybody named M’rell had ever lived 
in that house, or in Greenland, or anywhere that he 
knew of. He said never. He said nobody named 
that had ever been anywhere that he had ever heard 
of. So then we told him about the land pirate and 
the treasure, and he said it was all nonsense, because 
if anybody from down Arkansas way had ever been 
anywhere around there, he would have known it. 
So we told him not to say anything about the treas¬ 
ure, and told him that was what the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer and the Rat were after, and he said he would 
keep mum about it and sort of keep an eye on the 
Tough Customer and the Rat and let us know if 
anything happened. 


CHAPTER XV 

THE GRAPE TREE 

Well, one afternoon — it was about two weeks 
later — I was sitting on the grass where the mud 
cove is, just below our cottage up there on our Birch 
Island, and Jibby Jones was sitting beside me. We 
weren’t doing anything but waiting, or nothing 
much else, but we had three or four empty baskets 
and a rake and an axe beside us. We were waiting 
for Uncle Beeswax, because he was going to take 
us to get wild grapes. 

One day, just after we had met him at Greenland 
Creek Uncle Beeswax had stopped at Birch Island 
to see if our folks wanted any honey or beeswax. 
Generally, when he stopped at our island he went 
right past us boys and up to the cottages, but since 
we had saved him from the Tough Customer he liked 
us, I guess. That day Jibby Jones was rigging up a 
trot-line, and after Uncle Beeswax had told us that 
the Tough Customer and the Rat were still digging 
at the creek bank, and had said, a couple of times, 
My, what a nose! My, what a noble nose! ” he put 
down his baskets and looked at what Jibby was 
doing, and shook his head. 

Who taught you that way to tie hooks on a trot¬ 
line?” he asked. 


154 


THE GRAPE TREE 


“ Nobody did/’ Jibby said in his solemn way. “ l 
evolved this way out of my own head.” 

“Well, it is no way at all,” said Uncle Beeswax. 
“Let me show you.” 

So he showed Jibby how to fix hooks on a trot-line. 
You know what a trot-line is. It is a long, stout fish¬ 
line — mighty stout, too — and sometimes a quar¬ 
ter of a mile long, or more. You tie one end to a 
tree on the bank and have the rest of the line coiled 
in your skiff, with the hooks tied on about three or 
four feet apart, and while some one rows your skiff 
out into the river you pay out the line. When you 
come to the end of the line, you tie a big anchor 
rock on the end of it and chuck it overboard. The 
hooks are not fastened directly onto the trot-line. 
Each hook is on a short line of its own — maybe a 
foot and a half long, and the ends of these lines are 
tied to the trot-line. That lets them float free and 
gives a fish some play when it gets caught. Other¬ 
wise it might break away easier. It was the way 
Jibby was tying these hook-lines to the trot-line that 
Uncle Beeswax did not like. 

“If you tie them that way, Jibby,” he said, 
“they’ll slide back and forth along the line when a 
big fish gets on them. This is the right way.” 

So he showed Jibby, but Jibby did not bother to 
go over the job again. He thought the line might do 
as it was, because it was a big job to untie hundreds 
of hard knots and he wanted to get his trot-line in 
the water and catch some fish. 

155 


JIBBY JONES 


After that old Uncle Beeswax used to stop at the 
island every day he went by, and he knew more about 
the old river, and told us more, than any man ever 
did, except, maybe, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar. 
What Uncle Oscar did not know Uncle Beeswax did. 

Anyway, Jibby Jones put out his trot-line that 
afternoon after Uncle Beeswax went. He tied one 
end to a tree by the mud cove and Wampus and I 
rowed the skiff while Jibby paid out the trot-line 
and he anchored the far end out beyond the middle 
of the river with a rock big enough to hold a house 
from floating away. After that we “ran” the trot¬ 
line twice a day and we always got fish — some¬ 
times three or four catfish and white perch and 
sometimes a carp or two, but always some. When 
you “run” a trot-line one fellow rows the skiff to 
keep the current from sweeping it downstream too 
strong, and the other sits in the bow of the boat with 
the trot-line dragging over it. He pulls the boat 
along by pulling on the trot-line, and when he comes 
to a hook-line he takes off the fish — if there is one 
— and baits the hook and lets it slide back down 
into the water. 

So that’s that. There was Jibby’s trot-line stretch¬ 
ing out a quarter of a mile or so from our island, 
dipping into the river just a few feet beyond the 
tree it was tied to, like a submarine cable that did 
not go quite to Buffalo Island. When we were out 
“running” the line, old Uncle Beeswax would row 
toward us, if he happened to be rowing by, and he 

156 



THE GRAPE TREE 


would ask how many fish we were getting, and 
things like that. 

So, on this day in August, Jibby and I were out 
“running” the trot-line and Wampus was in the 
stern of our skiff, and here came old Uncle Beeswax 
rowing out from the shore of Buffalo Island toward 
us. There was quite a breeze blowing and his long 
gray whiskers blew out like a pennant. He rowed up 
alongside, and he was almost bobbing up and down 
on his seat, he was so excited. 

“My, my!” he cried. “My, oh, my! I just ran 
across the grandest grape tree I ever saw in my 
whole life, bar none whatever! More wild grapes 
than I ever saw in one place in all my born days. A 
big tree and just loaded down and weighted down 
and covered with grapes.” 

Well, we knew why he had come to tell us. He 
had said that sometime when he found a fine grape 
tree he would let us know and take us with him to 
get wild grapes, and he had found one. It was loaded 
down with wild grapes, Uncle Beeswax said. There 
were so many wild grapes the tree looked blue in¬ 
stead of green. It was worth going miles to see —* 
just to see, mind you! — and all those grapes were 
ours just for the getting! Bushels of them! No 
wonder Uncle Beeswax was excited. 

He was so excited he sputtered when he tried to 
talk, and his old hands trembled. It meant money 
for him because he sold wild grapes to women who 
wanted to make jelly, but he was almost as pleased 

157 


JIBBY JONES 


because he could show Jibby and us a real grape 
tree, and lead us where we could get our share of 
grapes from the most wonderful grape tree any man 
ever saw. It was a poor year for grapes, but that is 
the way the wild grapes behave. You’ll walk miles 
and see only a few skinny bunches that are all bird- 
picked and not worth bothering with, and then you’ll 
run across one tree just loaded down with vines 
and the vines loaded with full bunches of lovely 
blue grapes. 

Uncle Beeswax tried to tell us where the tree was, 
but we could not understand. We thought we had 
walked all over Buffalo Island, and we had never 
seen a tree like that. So he took a piece of paper from 
Jibby and a pencil from Wampus and he tried to 
draw a map. By the map we understood pretty well 
where the tree must be, and the reason we had never 
seen it was because it was hidden. The map Uncle 
Beeswax made showed why. 

Right straight across the river from the tree 
Jibby had his trot-line tied to was a sycamore tree 
on Buffalo Island. If you rowed across from Jibby’s 
trot-line tree to the sycamore tree and climbed the 
bank, you got into a tangle of briars and tall net¬ 
tles and wild flax and poison ivy thirty or forty feet 
wide, and that was a jungle nobody would want to 
break through. Just back of that was a sort of gully 
that the river had hollowed out, and that gully had 
been mushy mud all summer. It ran up and down 
for an eighth of a mile, both ways. 

U58 


THE GRAPE TREE 


Now, you know how all those islands are — all a 
mess of trees and vines and tangles of one sort and 
another. Whenever we landed on Buffalo Island, 
we would walk down along the shore until we were 
below the mushy gully, or up until we were above it, 
and, when we were coming from the other side and 
struck the gully, we did the same. That was all 
right, but we had been fooled every time. There 
was not just one gully; there were two of them. 
They joined together at their upper and lower ends. 
What we had always done, and what any one would 
do, was to look across the gully from the side toward 
the river and think we saw the woods on the other 
side, but what we saw was a little island of woods. 
The same way, looking across the gully from the is¬ 
land side of it, we thought we saw the tangle that 
was along the bank of the river, but we really saw 
• the little island of woods. Those islands fool you a 
thousand times, that way. So there was the little 
island between its mud gullies and that was where 
the wonderful grape tree was. All that had happened 
was that the hot, dry August days had dried the 
mud in the gullies, and Uncle Beeswax had walked 
across on the dry cakes of mud and had found the 
grape tree. 

That was simple enough, but if Uncle Beeswax 
could do it the next man looking for grapes could do 
it, too, and, with everybody looking for grapes for 
jelly and for wine, that might happen any minute. 
No wonder he was excited. 

*59 


JIBBY JONES 


He made it all clear enough for us and he gave 
Jibby the map. We dropped the trot-line back into 
the water in a hurry, I tell you! This was what we 
were to do. Jibby and Wampus and I were to row 
back to our island and tell Skippy Root and Tad 
Willing and get baskets and axes and a rake or two. 
The rakes were to pull down the vines. The axes 
were to chop down the tree. It’s a ruinous way to 
do, but it is the way every one does. 

Uncle Beeswax was to row up to his shanty-boat 
and get his own baskets and axe and rake and he was 
to stop at our mud cove for Jibby and me. Wampus 
and Skippy and Tad were to go in one skiff, and 
Uncle Beeswax and Jibby and I in the other. So 
Uncle Beeswax rowed off up the river and Jibby and 
Wampus and I rowed home across the river. 

We hunted up Skippy and Tad and told them 
what was up, and they got busy. They got baskets 
and axes and rakes, and Jibby and I did the same, 
and then Skippy and Wampus and Tad took my 
skiff and rowed away. They were to go over to the 
shore by the big sycamore tree and wait for us. We 
had to wait for Uncle Beeswax. That was why we 
were sitting there on the grass by the mud cove like 
I told you in the beginning. So we talked, because 
we had nothing else to do. Only, it was Jibby who 
talked. 


CHAPTER XVI 

CONGO MAGIC 

The thing that started Jibby talking was a feather. 
Right between his knees when he sat down was 
a crow’s tail feather, and he picked it up and it 
reminded him of something, because everything 
always did remind Jibby of something. He stuck it 
up in the ground. 

“What did you do that for?” I asked him. 

He looked at the feather. 

“ I don’t know,” he said. “ I guess it reminded me 
of the time I was on the Congo River.” 

“What about the Congo River does an old crow’s 
feather remind you of?” I asked him. 

“Well, magic,” Jibby said. “A black feather is 
one of the things the natives use for bad magic. 
They use a black feather when they want to spoil 
an enemy’s plans. They stick a black feather in the 
ground like this, and then they make a ring of other 
stuff around it and put magic things in the circle.” 

He showed me how they did it. He broke up some 
twigs and made a circle around the feather, and then 
he felt in his pocket for things to put in the circle. 
First he found his knife, and he held it in the cup of 
his two hands and said something like: 

“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!” 

161 


JIBBY JONES 


Only, of course, 1 can’t remember what it was he 
did say. Then he put his knife inside the magic circle, 
and took out a box of safety matches and said: 

“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!” 

Then he put the matches in the magic circle, and 
dug into his pocket again, and all he could find was 
three or four nails and a couple of screw eyes big 
enough to run a tiller rope through. He chanted: 

“Keeko, muk-muk, chuck-a-wah chang cho!” 

So into the magic circle went the nails and the 
screw eyes, and he looked around and picked up the 
map Uncle Beeswax had made, and he chanted over 
that and put that in the magic circle. Then he held 
out his hands over the whole business and began 
some more nonsense-chanting, starting low and get¬ 
ting louder, and I sort of got the idea and began to 
chant with him, and there we both were, slapping our 
knees and chanting away like lunatics: 

“Keeko! Keeko! 

Keeko, muk-muk, keeko! 

Chuck-a-wah! Chuck-a-wah! 

Chuck-a-wah chang cho chee!” 

And over and over again. And then, all of a sud¬ 
den, somebody was standing behind us. I nearly 
jumped out of my skin, I was so frightened at first. 
I thought maybe our magic had really raised an evil 
spirit or something, and then I saw it was Cawley 
Romer. And I hadn’t been so far wrong, either, for 
Cawl Romer is one of the meanest fellows that ever 

162 



SLAPPING OUR KNEES AND CHANTING AWAY LIKE LUNATICS 









CONGO MAGIC 


comes to our island. Only one is meaner, and that is 
his brother Hen. They are great big bullies. 

“What are you doing? ” Cawl Romer asked in that 
rough way a bully asks things. 

“Magic,” I said, as meek as Moses. “Jibby was 
showing me how the Congo natives do magic.” 

Cawl Romer was looking at the magic circle, 
and all at once he pushed his foot over it and 
knocked down the feather and scattered the twigs 
and things. 

“I’ll magic your magic for you!” he said in his 
mean way, but he kept his foot down and I saw why. 
He had it on top of the map Jibby had put in the 
magic circle. He bent down and took the map from 
under his foot. He turned it one way and another 
way and looked at it, but he couldn’t make any¬ 
thing out of it, Uncle Beeswax had done it so roughly 
and in such a hurry. 

“I know what this is,” he said. “I know why 
you’ve got baskets and this rake and this axe here. 
You know where a grape tree is.” 

“ It’s none of your business if we do,” I said, sulky¬ 
like, because I knew what Cawl Romer would be up 
to next. 

“Is that so!” he said. “Well, I’ll show you 
mighty soon whether it is my business or not. I saw 
Old Beeswax chin with you, and I saw him go row¬ 
ing off up the river. A grape tree belongs to the man 
that gets it. I just mean to clean this one out 
before ...” 

163 


JIBBY JONES 


"Keeko! Keeko! 

Keeko muk-muk keeko!” 

chanted Jibby Jones. 

He paid no attention to Cawl Romer at all, 
seemed like. He had stuck up the feather again and 
made his twig circle and was chanting as if nothing 
had happened. 

“You listen to me,” Cawl Romer said, pushing 
Jibby in the back with his foot. “Do you know 
where this grape tree is?” 

Jibby looked up at him as solemn as an owl. 

“ I don’t know what’s the matter with my nose!” 
he said. “I did know where that tree was; it was 
directly in front of my nose. That’s how I was going 
to it — I was going to follow my nose. But now my 
nose won’t point. It’s too bad!” 

“Well, I’ll attend to that,” said Cawl Romer. 
“ You’re going to show me where that tree is, nose or 
no nose, or you’ll be sorry you ever came to this 
island. And you, too, George. You know me! Now, 
you listen! I’m going up to my cottage and get Hen 
and some baskets, and you sit right here and don’t 
move! Understand that? If you’re not here, I’ll 
skin you and eat you when I do catch you.” 

Then he went away, and he took the map with 
him. Jibby sat where he was until Cawl Romer was 
out of sight and then he jumped up like a flash. 

‘ 1 Hasten! ” he said. * 1 Hasten! ’ ’ 

I did not know what he was up to. 

“What are you going to do?” I asked him. 

164 


CONGO MAGIC 


“Magic,” he said. “Congo magic, Georgie.” 

He went to his skiff and took out the bait pail and 
chucked it and we pulled the skiff out of the water 
and turned it upside down. Then he took the two 
big screw eyes. He started one into the bottom of 
the skiff by hitting it with a rock and then screwed 
it all the way in, and then he put in the other the 
same way. One was nearer the bow and the other 
nearer the stern. Then we swung the skiff around so 
the stern was shoreward and the bow toward the 
river and Jibby did a thing that seemed almost 
crazy. He untied the end of his trot-line from the 
tree and slipped the end through the two screw eyes 
in the keel of the skiff and tied the end of the trot¬ 
line to a tough root near the edge of the river. Then 
we heaved the skiff over and pushed it out into the 
water so the stern just rested on shore, and went 
back and sat down. I began to see what he was up 
to. He had the skiff strung on the trot-line, under 
water. Those Romer bullies would row across the 
river but when they got just so far they would come 
to the end of the trot-line, where it was tied to the 
big anchor stone, and there the skiff would stop. I 
chuckled. 

“Scratch a bully and you find a coward,” Jibby 
said. “ My Grandfather Parmenter used to say that, 
and he was a wise man. He had a nose like mine. 
Scratch a bully and find a coward.” 

“That’s all right enough,” I said, “but what are 
you going to gain by it? We could run away and 

165 


JIBBY JONES 


they couldn’t find us, and then we could tell our 
fathers and they wouldn’t let the Romers hurt us.” 

“And they have the map,” said Jibby. “If they 
look at it close enough, they can understand it. 
They’ll see Wampus and Skippy and Tad by the 
sycamore and know that is the big dot, and they’ll 
know the cross on the map is the grape tree. They’ll 
have it cleaned out before Uncle Beeswax can get 
here. And I like Uncle Beeswax. He’s my friend. 
He trusted us with the map. I’m going to save those 
grapes for him.” 

Well, Cawl Romer and his brother Hen came back 
and they acted mean and rough. They chucked our 
axe and our rake into Jibby’s skiff as if they didn’t 
care what damage they did, and they threw in their 
baskets and left ours on the shore. Then they made 
me get into the bow seat and they took the oars, and 
they made Jibby push off and hop into the stern seat. 

“And no talk out of you!” Cawl said. 

“ Keeko!” Jibby said. 

“ Keeko muk-muk, 

Chuck-a-wah chang cho!” 

“That’s magic,” Cawl Romer told Hen, sneering- 
like. Then he said to Jibby: “You can’t fool me! 
That’s no Congo magic talk. I don’t believe you 
ever saw the Congo. That’s more like some old 
Chinese laundry talk or Flatfoot Indian.” 

Well, it didn’t seem like much of a place for 
magic to work, even if there was such a thing. Miles 
and miles of blue sky, and the sun shining, and the 

166 


CONGO MAGIC 


big river rushing along, and we just plain boys, and 
the two Romers just everyday big bullies. Hen and 
Cawl pulled at the oars and sweated, too, for it is no 
easy job to row across the river there. You have to 
row more than half upstream or the current will 
carry you half a mile below where you want to go by 
the time you get across. And they were in a hurry, 
too. Uncle Beeswax was liable to come rowing down 
the river any time, and he was no sort of man to mix 
in with when he thought he had a fair right to a bee 
tree or a grape tree. Even big bullies like the Romers 
would steer clear of him then; all they wanted was 
to get across the river and clean up the wild grapes 
before Uncle Beeswax came, and all Jibby wanted 
was to hold them back long enough for Uncle Bees¬ 
wax to show up. So Jibby chanted again. 

“Keeko! Keeko! 

Chuck-a-muck-a-mayo! 

Chip-la, chip-la, chuck chang cho!” 

he chanted, or something like that, and he took the 
tip of his nose in his fingers and wiggled it back and 
forth. 

“Stop that!” Hen Romer said, as cross as a bear. 
“Don’t you put any magic on us!” 

“Aw, pshaw!” Cawl Romer said. “Don’t worry 
about him; he can’t magic a sick cat.” 

But just the same he began to frown a little. 

“What’s the matter with this boat?” he said. “ I 
wouldn’t have this boat for a gift. I never knew a 
boat to pull as hard as this boat pulls.” 

167 


JIBBY JONES 


I knew what was the matter. The screw eyes on 
the bottom of the skiff had come to Jibby’s hook¬ 
lines on his trot-line and were dragging them along 
the trot-line the way Uncle Beeswax had said a big 
fish might. 

“Row, why don’t you?” Cawl shouted over his 
shoulder at Hen. 

“I am rowing as hard as I can,” Hen shouted 
back. “Row some yourself and don’t make me do 
it all.” 

Every stroke they took the screw eyes gathered 
up another hook-line and added it to those they were 
already dragging. The Romers panted and puffed 
and pulled until their eyes stuck out an inch, almost, 
but they could just barely make the skiff move. 

“Plenty keeko!” Jibby said, and stopped chant¬ 
ing. 

“Pull, why don’t you?” Cawl shouted at Hen 
again. 

They did pull, too. Out there in the middle of the 
river, with the current rushing the water past the 
skiff and the skiff pointed halfway upstream and the 
shores a good distance away, no one can tell whether 
a skiff is moving much or not. Those two Romers 
buckled down hard and strained every muscle and 
did their level best. They got madder and madder 
and scolded each other, and the boat hardly moved 
an inch at a stroke. They kept looking over their 
shoulders at the Buffalo Island shore and simply 
humped their backs, but the shore did not seem to 

168 


CONGO MAGIC 


come any nearer. They rowed harder than I ever 
saw any one row outside of a race. They made the 
oars bend. Then they came to the end of the trot¬ 
line, where it dipped down to the big anchor rock and 
the boat did not move at all. And, away up the 
river, I saw a black speck that I was pretty sure must 
be Uncle Beeswax rowing down. 

Cawl Romer rested on his oars a minute. 

“What does this mean, Jones?” he asked Jibby, 
and he was mighty mad. “You can’t fool me. There 
is no such thing as magic. What’s the matter with 
this boat?” 

“It don’t seem to go, somehow,” Jibby said. 

“He’s put a spell on it, that’s what he’s done,” 
Hen Romer said. “You can’t fool me! I never saw a 
boat yet that I couldn’t row some. He’s magicked 
us, Cawl.” 

Cawl took up his oars and began to row, but he 
looked worried. 

“ I don’t believe in magic,” he said, but he did not 
say it as if he meant it. “ How could he put a spell on 
a boat? He couldn’t do it.” 

“ I don’t know what a fellow with a nose like that 
can do,” Hen said, and he said it as if he did mean 
it. “ I didn’t like his looks the first time I saw him, 
and I told you so. I said to keep away from him. 
And don’t you try to tell me there isn’t magic. You 
just remember Uncle Harris and the colored conjure 
woman!” 

Welfi I didn’t know what he meant by his Uncle 

169 


JIBBY JONES 


Harris and the conjure woman, but I guess Cawl 
did, for he looked uneasy. 

“You be still!” he said. Then he turned to me. 
“Did he put magic on this boat?” he asked. 

“How do I know?” I asked. “He was doing 
something with a feather and some sticks — that’s 
all I know.” 

“Well, he’s magicked us!” Cawl said all of a sud¬ 
den, dropping his oars. “That’s what he’s done; 
he’s put a spell on us.” 

He picked up one oar and felt the depth of the 
river and could not touch bottom on any side. So 
Hen stopped rowing. As soon as they both stopped 
rowing, the boat sagged around with the current and 
the pull on the trot-line was heavy. I looked up the 
river and saw Uncle Beeswax was rowing for us and 
was near enough to hear us. I yelled to him and 
waved my arms. Hen and Cawl had seen him, too. 
They made a last effort and took up their oars and 
rowed hard, but it was no use. Uncle Beeswax bore 
down on us and came alongside and grasped the gun¬ 
wale of our skiff. The Romers stopped rowing, too, 
and that put the full weight of both skiffs, with the 
whole current behind them, on the trot-line and 
she parted as easy as you would break a rotten 
thread. 

“What’s the matter?” Uncle Beeswax asked. 

The skiffs were floating down-river as easy as you 
please. 

“Nothing,” Jibby said. “These Romers wanted 

170 


CONGO MAGIC 

to come along and the skiff did not want them 
to.” 

u Neither do I; I don’t like ’em, hoof nor hide,” 
said Uncle Beeswax, who was plain-spoken enough 
when he wanted to be. 

Wampus and Tad and Skippy are waiting by the 
sycamore, Jibby said. “Maybe you’d better go on 
and get the grapes, Uncle Beeswax, and we’ll see if we 
can row this skiff home. It may be willing to go across 
the river one way if it isn’t willing to go the other.” 

The two Romers scowled a lot at this, but they 
took to the oars. 1 hey did not bother to row us back 
to our mud cove. They rowed across the easiest 
w r ay, and that landed us down near the end of Birch 
Island, and they got out there. They did not say a 
word. As long as we could see them, as we rowed 
back across the river to the sycamore tree, they 
were standing there talking to each other — trying 
to make up their minds whether they believed in 
magic or not, I guess. 

Well, Uncle Beeswax got his wild grapes and, after 
we got home, Jibby reeled in his trot-line. He had 
lost most of his hooks, but he did not mind that; he 
had kept the Romers from doing Uncle Beeswax out 
of his grapes. 

“Jibby,” Wampus asked, when I had told him 
and Skippy and Tad about the screw eyes and the 
trot-line and all, “how on earth did you ever think 
of putting the screw eyes in the keel of the skiff and 
running the trot-line through them?” 

171 


JIBBY JONES 


“Well, I’ll explain it,” Jibby Jones said. ”1 had 
the screw eyes ...” 

“Yes.” 

“And I had the trot-line . . .” 

“Yes.” 

“And I had the skiff ...” 

“Yes.” 

“Well, what else could anybody do with a couple 
of screw eyes and a trot-line and a skiff?” Jibby 
asked. “ I couldn’t think of anything else to do with 
them, so I did that. But I’m sorry for one thing. 

“The feather,” Jibby said. “That crow feather 
was wasted. I couldn’t think of any way to use it. 
I tried, but I couldn’t.” 


CHAPTER XVII 

GRAINS OF SAND 

For a while nothing much happened. It got along 
to the first of September, and all of us had to leave 
Birch Island and go back down to Riverbank, be¬ 
cause we had to go to school. Old Uncle Beeswax 
came to the island a day or so before we left, and he 
said the Tough Customer and the Rat had given up 
digging for the land pirate’s treasure. 

Uncle Beeswax had hardly gone when we saw the 
Tough Customer’s old shanty-boat floating down 
the river, past our island, and we knew they had 
given up hope and were going away. It did seem as 
if the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Explora¬ 
tion Company had had about as bad luck as the 
Tough Customer, too, and that our hunting had 
been wasted. We thought the treasure was a fake, 
and that there wasn’t any, and that if there was we 
were all through with it. But we were not through 
with it yet, not by a long shot! If we had known the 
truth, we were just at the beginning of it. 

A couple of days before we were to go down to 
town, all four of us were out there on the riverbank 
with the different things we had collected during the 
summer, making up our minds what we would keep 
and take home with us and what we would throw 
away. 

I was there, and so were Skippy Root and Tad 

173 


JIBBY JONES 


Willing and Wampus Smale, and we had all our 
curiosities spread out, when up came Jibby Jones. 
He stood there looking at our curiosities, with his 
hands behind his back, and he did look funny with 
his tortoise-shell spectacles and his big nose like the 
jib of a boat and a suit that needed to grow a lot 
before it was big enough for him. 

“You’ve got a nice lot of things,” he said. 

And we had, too. You can find a lot of dandy curi¬ 
osities up there on that island and around the river. 
We had chunks of rock from the ripraps with fossils 
in them, and carnelians from the levee, and turtle 
shells without the turtles in them, and roots that 
looked like snakes or people, and about six kinds 
of mussel shells, and some birds’ eggs — we had a 
whole lot of dandy things. It looked like about a ton 
when we had them all spread out before us. They 
were fine for our collections. 

“Where are yours?” Wampus asked Jibby. 

Jibby had had some bully news to tell us a couple 
of days before. His folks were going to stay in River- 
bank all winter, because Jibby’s father was writing 
a book or something. 

“If you haven’t got any shells and rocks and 
things,” Tad said to Jibby, “you’d better get them 
now. Maybe you’ll go away in the spring, and 
maybe this is your last chance to get them. There is 
plenty of time yet.” 

“Thank you,” Jibby said, “but I don’t want to 
get any.” 


m 


GRAINS OF SAND 


“ Don’t you collect anything? ” Skippy asked. “ I 
thought everybody had a collection of some kind.” 

“Oh, yes!” Jibby said. “I do collect. I have a 
collection. But I don’t collect big things any more. 
My father put a stop to it years ago.” 

“What were you collecting then?” Wampus 
asked. 

“ Hides,” Jibby said, as serious as an owl. “ I had 
a white mouse once and it died, so I saved the hide, 
and I thought it would be nice to collect hides — to 
get a collection of all the kinds of hides in the world.” 

“Say!” Skippy said. “That would be bully, 
wouldn’t it? Why wouldn’t your father let you 
collect them?” 

“Well, we were in Egypt then,” said Jibby Jones, 
“and the next hide I collected was one a hunter gave 
me. It was a hippopotamus hide and it needed an 
ox cart with four oxen to haul it. When it came to 
our tent I was greatly pleased, and I told father I 
knew where there was a crocodile hide a boy would 
trade me if I could get something to trade for it. It 
weighed about one hundred pounds. And I knew 
an old Arab that had a sick camel, and he said 
I could have the camel’s hide if the camel died, only 
I would have to skin the camel — he was too busy. 
So I asked father if he would help me skin the 
camel.” 

“And wouldn’t he?” asked Wampus. 

“No,” said Jibby Jones. “Father put his foot 
down. He said I could not collect hides. We often 

175 


JIBBY JONES 


traveled with only one suitcase, because he was an 
author and had to be in a hurry, and he said that if 
my collection amounted to much, &nd I got an ele¬ 
phant hide and a rhinoceros hide and, maybe, a 
giraffe hide and a buffalo hide, and added them to 
my mouse hide and my hippopotamus hide, there 
wouldn’t be room in the suitcase for his toothbrush. 
So I began to collect something else.” 

“What are you collecting now?” asked Skippy, 
and we all listened for the answer, because, if Jibby 
Jones was collecting anything, we did not know it. 

“Sand,” Jibby said. “I rowed over to the sand 
bar this morning and got eight grains of sand to add 
to my collection.” 

Well, we just all lay back and yelled. It was 
about the funniest thing we ever thought of — al¬ 
most six feet of Jibby Jones going all the way over 
to the sand bar on the other side of the river with 
his spectacles and everything, to get eight grains of 
sand! 

Jibby Jones looked at us awhile, sort of smiling as 
if he could not quite see what we were laughing at, 
and then he said: 

“But, of course, I don’t always get eight grains; 
mostly I only get one or two grains. I got eight 
grains because this is the best summer I ever had in 
my life and I want to remember it forever. I got 
eight grains of Mississippi River sand so that if any 
got lost I would still have enough to remember you 
boys by.” 


176 


GRAINS OF SAND 


‘‘And is that all you are collecting?” Wampus 
asked. 

“Yes,” Jibby Jones said. “Father don’t like me 
to collect bulky things, and I thought grains of sand 
were about as small as anything could be, so I col¬ 
lect them.” 

Well, that is how Jibby Jones was. He looked 
silly, with his nose like a jib and his serious look, but 
there was always some good sense in what he said 
and did. When you come to think of it a grain of 
sand is just about the smallest thing there is. 

Grains of sand did seem queer things to collect, 
just the same, when you think that all you have to 
do is walk across a sand bar in low shoes and you get 
two shoes full in about a minute and find grains of 
sand in your bed for about a week. So we sort of 
teased Jibby Jones, and the end of it was that we 
all went into his father’s cottage to look at Jibby 
Jones’s collection. 

Say! He brought out a little tin box just about as 
big as my hand, and opened it, and he brought out a 
magnifying-glass that was a dandy. That magnify¬ 
ing-glass made a pin look as big as a railway spike, 
almost. It made a grain of sand look almost as big 
as a diamond a lady wears in a ring. I guess we did 
open our eyes when Jibby Jones began to show us 
his collection of grains of sand. 

In the little tin box were little squares of card, 
just about the size of postage stamps, and each 
grain of sand was glued to its card, with the place it 

177 


JIBBY JONES 


came from and the date Jibby Jones got that grain 
of sand all written out on the little card. He had 
each little card wrapped in tissue paper, so that if the 
grain of sand came off the card it would not be lost. 

The first specimen he let us see was a grain of sand 
from the seashore of the Atlantic Ocean, United 
States. Without the magnifying-glass you could not 
see it at all, but when we looked through the glass 
at it we all said, “Oh, boy!” It was like a drop of 
moonlight shut up in a clear stone. It did not 
sparkle; it glowed. Then he showed us one from the 
Pacific Ocean that was like yellow sunlight. 

Just about then we changed our minds about 
Jibby Jones having a fool sort of collection. He had 
a grain of sand from every place he had been. He 
had one from the Nile, and one from the edge of the 
Sahara Desert, and one from the River Jordan, and 
two from the St. Lawrence and hundreds more. 

“This one is from the San Gabriel River in Cali¬ 
fornia,” Jibby Jones said, when he showed us one 
grain. “ It isn’t very odd, but it was got in a queer 
way. Father wouldn’t stop to let me get a grain of 
sand out of that river, because we were just going by 
on an interurban trolley car, so I thought I would get 
a grain of sand, anyway. I chewed some gum and 
fastened it to a string, and when we went over the 
bridge I stood on the end of the car and let the gum 
drag in the sand. It caught a lot of grains.” 

Jibby Jones had about the bulliest collection I ever 
looked at. 


178 


GRAINS OF SAND 


“ It is just as good as a collection of mountains and 
caverns and all sorts of minerals would be, when you 
get used to it,” Jibby Jones said, “because that is 
what sand is — mountains and rocks that have 
broken down and been crushed and then rolled by 
the water until the sharp edges are worn smooth.” 

He had some cards that had more than one 
grain of sand glued to them — fifty or a hundred 
grains. 

“When I get specimens for places,” Jibby Jones 
said, “I keep only one grain of sand, because father 
didn’t want me to collect anything bulky, but these 
are for color, so I keep more grains.” 

Well, I did not know there were so many kinds of 
sand in the whole world! Jibby Jones had black 
sand, and sand as red as blood, and sand as blue as 
indigo, and sand of almost every color you ever 
heard of, and then some colors you never did hear of. 
We were saying, “Oh, boy!” and, “My gimini 
crickets!” every minute, and, all at once, Skippy 
said: 

“Say, Jibby, you haven’t any green sand!” 

“Yes, I have,” Jibby said, and he showed us a 
card of green sand. 

“I don’t mean that kind of green,” Skippy said. 
“I mean green that the light shows through; not 
solid green. I know where there is a kind of green 
you have not got. You know, fellows; that green 
sand in Murrell’s Run, down below town.” 

“ Sure! I know! ” I said, as excited as if somebody 

179 


JIBBY JONES 


had told me where there was a million dollars. “Out 
back of that old brick house, Skippy.” 

We all remembered it. We had found it one day 
when we were wading up the Run, and there was a 
lot of it. It was right in the bottom of the Run, and 
we all waded in it and dug our toes in it and said it 
was a queer kind of sand. 

Jibby Jones straightened up and looked at me 
through his spectacles. 

“Green sand?” he said in a queer way. “Green 
sand?” 

“You bet!” I said. “And lots of it. And it’s the 
only place anybody ever heard of green sand being, 
around here.” 

“ In a creek?” Jibby asked. < 

“Yes; up in the hills below town,” I said. “Only 
they don’t call that creek a creek; they call it a 
‘run’ — Murl’s Run,” I said, pronouncing it the 
way we always did. 

“I’d like to have some of that green sand — for 
my collection,” Jibby drawled. 

“Well,” I said, “we’ll get you some; we know 
right where it is.” 

“I would rather get it myself,” Jibby said. “I 
like my sand specimens when I get them myself.” 

So that was how, the first Saturday after school 
began, Jibby Jones went with us out toward the 
Run. We all wanted to get green sand for our collec¬ 
tions of sand, because we had all four started in col¬ 
lecting sand. As soon as we got through looking at 

180 



GRAINS OF SAND 


Jibby’s collection, we went over to the sand bar to 
get some Mississippi River sand to start our collec¬ 
tions. Only we didn’t get just one grain apiece; we 
got about a peck apiece. We thought maybe we 
could exchange grains of Mississippi River sand with 
boys in California and other places. We got enough 
sand to exchange with about a million boys, and 
there was plenty left in the river, too. 

Going to Murrell’s Run to get the green sand we 
went out the road past the cemetery for about five 
miles, and just before we got to the Run we came to 
a crossroads, where an old tumbledown brick house 
stands. We were going right on past when, all at 
once, Jibby Jones stopped short. 

“Hello!” he said. “Look at that!” 

We stopped and looked, but there wasn’t any¬ 
thing to see. It was nothing but the old deserted 
brick farmhouse at the crossing of the roads. It was 
a one-story house with an attic, and the roof was 
falling in. All the doors and windows were gone, and 
the barn behind the house was nothing but a pile of 
rotted wood, flat on the ground. Tall weeds, mostly 
gone to seed now, were everywhere. It looked as if 
nobody had lived in that house for a hundred years. 
There was one big horse-chestnut tree by the house 
and one dead tree in the corner, just where the roads 
crossed, and all the rest was tangled blackberry 
bushes. 

“What do you see?” Wampus Smale asked. “I 
don’t see anything.” 

181 


JIBBY JONES 


That old house had been there so long and we had 
seen it so often that we never thought anything 
about it. It was not even gloomy enough to look 
like a haunted house. We had played all over it, be¬ 
cause Wampus Smale’s father owned that piece of 
land and the new house that was up the road five 
hundred yards or so. But Jibby Jones stood in the 
road, sniffing the air and wiggling his nose. 

“Do you smell money?” he asked. 

We all sniffed then. I know how paper money 
smells, but I could not smell that smell. Neither 
could Wampus or Skippy or Tad. We said so. 

“ I don’t mean paper money; I mean gold money,” 
Jibby Jones said. “Can you smell gold money?” 

“Pshaw, no!” Skippy said, but he sniffed at the 
air first. “Of course I can’t. Nobody can smell gold 
money; it hasn’t any smell.” 

“Neither can I,” said Jibby Jones. “I have a 
good nose, but it can’t smell gold. I just thought 
perhaps your noses could. If you can’t smell any¬ 
thing that smells like gold money, can you see any¬ 
thing that looks like it?” 

We all looked as hard as we could, but we did not 
see anything that looked like gold money, or like 
anything much of anything. So we said so. 

Wampus laughed. 

“He’s fooling us,” he said, and then he asked 
Jibby Jones: “What do you see?” 

“I see that old dead tree in the corner,” Jibby 
Jones said. “ Do you know what kind of tree that is? ” 

182 


GRAINS OF SAND 


We were all pretty well interested by this time, so 
we went up to the tree and looked at it and felt of it, 
and Wampus put his pug nose up against it and 
smelled it. Maybe he thought he could smell the 
gold money. The tree was so old the bark was all off 
it, and it had been struck by lightning once or twice 
and the top was all gone. When we had looked it 
over, we did not know what to think. We thought 
maybe Jibby Jones thought it was some kind of tree 
that was worth a lot of money, the way black walnut 
was during the war. But I said: 

“I know what kind of tree it was. It was a pine 
tree. And I know what kind of tree it is. It is a dead 
tree.” 

“Of course,” Jibby Jones said, as solemn as ever; 
“but I don’t mean that. I mean what other kind of 
tree it was.” 

“ Well,” Skippy said, “if you mean whether it was 
a short-leaf pine or a long-leaf pine, I give it up. I 
can’t tell that by an old dead trunk like this.” 

“I don’t mean that,” Jibby Jones said. “Don’t 
you see where the tree is?” 

We began to get excited now. 

“Right in the corner!” he said. “There’s the 
house, and here is what must have been the door- 
yard of the house, and right in the corner is this pine 
tree. Didn’t you ever hear of John A. M’rell?” 

“Ginger!” I cried. “Ginger!” For M’rell was 
the way Jibby Jones always pronounced the land 
pirate’s name. 


183 


JIBBY JONES 


“This tree was a signal pine,” Jibby said, as seri¬ 
ous as a judge. “The minute I saw it, I knew it was 
a pine tree, and the minute I saw it was in the 
corner, I knew it might be a John A. M’rell signal 
pine. Didn’t anybody ever talk about hunting 
treasure here?” 

We just looked at Jibby Jones and stared. 

“No; nobody ever said anything about treasure 
up here,” Tad said. 

“Then we’ve got a chance — a great chance,” 
Jibby Jones said, more excited than we ever saw 
him. “Maybe we can find ten thousand dollars, 
and maybe we can find a hundred thousand dollars. 
It just shows how ignorant people can be, even 
when things are right under their noses. Here is a 
fortune lying where anybody can put their hands on 
it, and they don’t know it. My gracious! I thought 
you fellows said you knew all about the Mississippi 
River.” 

“Aw!” Wampus said. “What are you talking 
about the river for? This isn’t the river; this is 
farmland.” 

“If you knew all about the river, you would know 
all about all parts of it,” Jibby Jones said. “You 
would know about Arkansas and Mississippi and the 
things that happened there. You’d know that when¬ 
ever there is a lone pine in the corner of a farm, 
it might be a M’rell tree. And you’d remember 
it whenever anybody talked about land pirate’s 
treasure. You’d know that people down there have 

184 


GRAINS OF SAND 


hunted and hunted for John A. M’rell’s hidden 
money, and never found it. Of course, they didn’t 
find it. Why? Because it’s here. The minute I saw 
this tree, I knew this was where it was hidden.” 

“Yes, but—” Wampus began. 

“How far is it from here to the river or to the 
slough, if there is a slough?” 

“Of course there’s a slough,” I said. “There’s 
Riverbank Slough. It’s two or three miles from 
here.” 

“Yes, but —” Wampus said again. 

“But what?” Jibby asked. 

“But this isn’t the place; this can’t be the place,” 
Wampus said. “The map said Greenland.” 

Jibby took off his hat and unpinned the map from 
inside the sweat-band, where he always carried it. 
He spread it out on his hand. 

“ ‘Land ’ or ‘sand,’ ” he said. “ It might be one or 
the other, the way it is scribbled. It’s ‘Greenland’ 
or it’s ‘green sand,’ just as you want to read it. And 
there wasn’t any treasure at Greenland. Look here 
— where would the green sand be, according to this 
map?” 

We leaned over the map and studied it a minute. 

“ Right there,” said Tad, putting his finger on the 
very spot where the “X” mark was. 

“All right!” Jibby said. “Here’s your river, and 
here’s your slough, and here’s your creek, and here’s 
your crossroads. And these criss-cross scribble 
marks stand for Riverbank. And here’s your signal 

185 


JIBBY JONES 


pine, and your house, and your green sand right 
where the ‘ X ’ mark is — and marked * green sand ’ 
plain enough for anybody. And what would John 
A. M’rell’s brother send as directions if he hid the 
money here, and John A. M’rell was a criminal and 



likely to be hunted when he was coming for his 
treasure?” 

“ What would he say?” Tad asked. 

“He would say, ‘Come up the Mississippi River 
to Riverbank, Iowa. Only, you’d better not go 
there; they may be looking for you. So, when you 
come to the first slough below Riverbank, row up 
the slough until you come to a creek. You can sneak 
up that creek without much chance of anybody 
seeing you. So come along up the creek until you 

186 






GRAINS OF SAND 


come to some green sand, about two or three miles 
back from the slough. And, when you come to 
the green sand, climb up the creek bank and you’ll 
see a brick house, and a signal pine I planted. 
That’s where I am.’” 

“Gee!” I said, it was all so plain. 

“How do you pronounce M-u-r-r-e-1-1?” Jibby 
Jones asked. 

“ Murl,” I said. 

“Well, that old negro Mose pronounced it M’rell,” 
Jibby Jones said. “M’rell and Murl is all the same. 
One is the Southern way of saying it, and the other 
is the Northern way. And you say the name of this 
creek is Murl’s Run. That’s M’rell’s Run — M-u-r- 
r-e-l-l’s Run. This is the place!” 


CHAPTER XVIII 

PIRATE’S TREASURE 

Well, that all sounded reasonable enough. We 
were all standing under the old pine tree, and Wam¬ 
pus and Skippy and Tad and I started for the old 
house on a run, but Jibby just stood there by the 
tree. 

“Come on!” we shouted. “Come on and search 
the house.” 

“You go,” Jibby said. “I want to think this out 
first. I can think hidden treasure better when I’m 
here by the signal tree. I thought out about it being 
here, and Pvegot to think where it would be hidden.” 

He leaned up against the tree and stayed there. 
He was rubbing that big nose of his with his fore¬ 
finger, but we did not watch him long; we piled into 
the house and began to hunt pirate’s treasure with 
all our might. 

We pounded on the walls and rummaged in every 
room, hunting for secret hiding-places, and every¬ 
thing had a different look to us. Nothing changes a 
place like thinking there is treasure hidden in it. 
We were all as busy as bees. 

I was up in the attic, under the roof that was 
tumbling in, and Skippy and Tad were on the 
ground floor, pounding and poking, and Wampus 
was in the cellar that was under about half the 

188 


PIRATE’S TREASURE 


house. The way we worked you might have thought 
the treasure was butter that might melt and run 
away if we did not find it soon enough. Wherever 
there was a loose brick we pried it out, and wherever 
there was a loose board we pried it up. 

Now and then I looked through the broken roof, 
and there was Jibby Jones by the old pine tree, 
rubbing the side of his nose slowly with his finger 
and looking first one way and then another. Some¬ 
times he would look at the sky, and then he would 
look far off into the distance, and then he would look 
at the house. Now and then he would shake his 
head, and once he took off his hat and hit himself 
three or four times on the head with his fist, as if he 
was trying to make his brains work better by jog¬ 
gling them. I would have laughed, but I could not 
waste the time, so I only grinned. He was a funny 
fellow. 

I was poking around, doing my best to find a 
million dollars or so, and finding nothing but cob¬ 
webs and dust, when I heard Wampus shout in the 
cellar. 

“Come down here quick,” he shouted; “I’ve 
found something.” 

I slid down from the attic and Skippy and Tad 
were already piling down into the cellar. I went to 
a window and shouted to Jibby to come, but he 
only waved his hand. 

“Wampus has found something in the cellar; 
come on! ” I shouted; but Jibby only waved his hand 

189 


JIBBY JONES 


again, although he heard me well enough, so I piled 
down into the cellar, too. 

Wampus was showing Skippy and Tad a place in 
the cellar floor, and he was as excited as a kitten 
with a mouse. 

“Listen to this and then to this,” he was saying, 
and he thumped on the floor of the cellar in different 
places with his heel. The floor was just a dirt floor. 
In some places it was dry and dusty and in other 
places dry and hard, but wherever Wampus stamped 
his heel, except one, it sounded solid; in that one 
place, bigger around than a barrel, the floor gave a 
hollow sound. 

“You’ve found it!” Skippy cried. “Call Jibby. 
He has a right to be here when we get the money. 
And we’ll divide it into five parts; one for each of 
us.” 

So Tad went to fetch Jibby Jones. Do you think 
he would come? Not a bit. When Tad told him 
what we had found, Jibby just rubbed his nose a 
little slower. 

“ Go ahead and look there if you want to,” he said 
to Tad, “but be careful you don’t fall in and get 
drowned. I’m glad you found it, because it is a good 
sign, but I’ve got to think out where that treasure 
is.” 

That was all Tad could get out of him. When Tad 
came back to the cellar, we were all digging at the 
floor over the hollow-sounding place with our jack- 
knives, but Tad sent me up to see if I could get half 

190 


PIRATE’S TREASURE 


a dozen shingles off the old roof that would be sound 
enough to dig with. I got eight or ten and took a 
look at Jibby Jones. He had not stirred. 

Tad and Wampus and Skippy and I dug the dirt 
away, using the old shingles to dig with, and we 
came to boards. The boards were thick, but they 
were dry-rotted. We cleared away all the dirt that 
covered them and pulled up the boards. By this 
time it was getting dark, especially down there in the 
cellar. We looked down into that dark hole and we 
could not see anything. I threw a piece of dirt down 
and it sounded dry. I asked Tad and Wampus and 
Skippy for a match, but none of us had any, so I 
went out to ask Jibby Jones for one, if he had 
one. 

“ I can’t figure it out,” he said. “I’ve been think¬ 
ing and thinking, but I can’t find it.” 

“Find what?” I asked him. 

“The hidden treasure,” he said. 

“What do you want to think for?” I asked him. 
“That’s no way to find it. The way to find things is 
to hunt for them.” 

“No, George,” Jibby said. “No! That’s not the 
way. That’s not the way Columbus did. He thought 
it out first. He thought until he was sure the world 
was round, and then he knew that if he sailed west 
from Spain he would find India.” 

“But he didn’t find India,” I said. 

“He found something almost as good,” Jibby 
grinned. 

191 


JIBBY JONES 


“But we’ve found the treasure hole already,” I 
said. “Come on and help us down into it.” 

“No,” Jibby said slowly. “No, George. I’m 
going to stay here and think where that treasure is 
hidden. I’ll find it quicker that way.” 

“Then give me some matches,” I said. “We’ve 
found the secret hole and we’re going to see what is 
in it, treasure or no treasure.” 

Jibby gave me a box of safety matches. 

“Get some dry grass and light it and throw it 
down before you go down yourself,” he said. “There 
may be poison air down there. If there is, the air will 
put the grass out. If the grass bums, it is safe for 
you to go down. But you won’t find anything. I’m 
glad you found the hole, because it is a cistern, and 
it used to have water in it. That’s a good sign for us, 
because, if the cistern was put in the cellar, it means 
that the people in the house may have been afraid 
they would have to stand a siege sometime and did 
not want to have to surrender for lack of water. 
That looks like pirate business.” 

Wampus was shouting for me to hurry. I ran to 
the old house, and we did as Jibby had told me. The 
grass burned clear and bright, and Wampus and Tad 
held me by my arms and lowered me into the old cis¬ 
tern. It looked as if Jibby was right; there wasn’t 
much down there but dust and flakes of rotted 
wood, but I lighted one twist of dried grass after 
another and scraped all over the bottom of that cis¬ 
tern. Tad and Wampus and Skippy were flat on the 

192 


PIRATE’S TREASURE 


cellar floor, looking down and telling me what to do, 
but I had just made up my mind it was no use 
scraping around any longer when I scraped up a 
coin. 

It was just one coin, and it was the only coin we 
found in that cistern, but it made me feel bully. We 
had found something, anyway. 

The coin was a dollar, and it was as black as coal, 
the way silver gets when it isn’t kept polished. I 
scraped and scraped, after that, but it was no use — 
that was all the treasure we found. The fellows 
pulled me out of the hole. 

By this time it was plumb dark, and we lighted 
matches and looked at the dollar we had found. It 
was an old one, but not worn at all — it was as clean 
and sharp as the day it was made. Tad was looking 
at it, and all at once he kicked up and threw his cap 
on the cellar floor and jumped on it, and shouted 
like a crazy man. 

“Oh, boy!” he yelled. “Oh, you boy, you!” 

As soon as we had looked at the dollar and had 
seen what Tad had seen, we jumped and yelled, too. 
Then we piled out of the cellar and ran to where 
Jibby Jones was still standing by the old pine 
tree. We were all shouting and kicking up and 
yipping like mad, but Jibby, when we reached 
him, just sighed as if there was no more hope in the 
world. 

“Oh, you Jibby!” I shouted. “What do you 
think we found?” 


193 


JIBBY JONES 

Jibby shook his head. He was not interested 
at all. 

“I can’t think it out!” he said, drawling like he 
always does. “That John A. Murrell treasure ought 
to be somewhere, but I can’t think where it is. He 
would send it here by a trusty messenger, and the 
man here would hide it. It would have to be hidden 
in a safe place, and in a place that John A. Murrell 
could find, even if the man here moved away and the 
house and bam burned and every one died. But I 
can’t think where — ” 

“But what do you think we found?” we shouted. 
“We found it in the old cistern. Look, Jibby! 
An 1804 dollar! And as good as the day it was 
minted.” 

“That’s nice,” he said, careless-like, and he went 
on thinking. 

“But it’s an 1804 dollar, Jibby!” I yelled at him. 
“Don’t you know what that means? It is worth a 
thousand dollars, maybe; it is the rarest of all the 
dollars. A thousand dollars! We’ll sell it and divide 
the money.” 

I don’t believe he heard a word. Did you ever 
hear of such a fellow? We had found an 1804 dollar, 
and we shouted it at him, and he took no more 
notice of us than if we had been four gnats buzzing 
around him. He was more interested in leaning up 
against an old pine tree, trying to think where some 
old land pirate might have hid some old treasure — 
if there ever was any treasure — than he was in a 

194 


PIRATE’S TREASURE 


genuine 1804 dollar. And he looked so glum over it 
that I thought he was going to cry. 

“Well, we’ve got to go home,” he said. “It’s 
dark now. I don’t know what is the matter with this 
old head of mine. I thought it was good for some¬ 
thing, but I guess not. I guess my brains have got 
glued together.” 

“But, say!” I said. “You did not really think 
you could stand here and think exactly where the 
treasure was buried, so we could walk right to it, 
did you?” I asked Jibby. 

11 Why, of course, I did! ” Jibby Jones said. 11 That 
ought to be easy, oughtn’t it? If this old head of 
mine wasn’t off on a vacation or something, we 
would have had that treasure by now.” 

He said something about showing that old head 
of his that it couldn’t behave that way with him, 
and he turned around and bumped his forehead 
against the old pine tree three or four times. At the 
last bump Jibby stood back and put his hand to his 
head. 

“Solid!” he said. “Solid wood!” 

“What? The tree?” Wampus asked. 

“No, my head,” Jibby laughed. Then he hit each 
of us with his fist, for fun and to show he was 
tickled. “I’ve found it!” he said. “I know where 
that treasure is.” 

“Where?” we all asked. 

“In my head,” he said, and he laughed again. “I 
won’t tell you where else it is, because we’ll need a 

195 


JIBBY JONES 


spade to dig for it, and it is too dark now, and we 
can’t come to-morrow, because it is Sunday. We’ll 
come out and get it next week sometime. Did you 
say you had found something?” 

We told him all over again, and he looked at the 
1804 dollar by the light of a match and said it was 
genuine, and we all felt fine and bully. We hiked 
toward home at a good rate, talking and shouting, 
and all at once Jibby Jones stopped short. 

“ Pshaw!” he said. “We forgot something!” 

“What?” I asked. 

“We forgot what we went for; we did not get that 
green sand,” Jibby said. “We’ll have to get that 
the next time we come.” 

“After we dig up the treasure,” Wampus said. 

“No, before we do anything else,” Jibby said. 
“Treasure is nothing but money, and I may have 
plenty of chances to get money in my life, but this 
may be the only green sand I ever have a chance to 
get. We’ll get the sand first.” 

We had to agree to it. If Jibby knew where the 
land pirate’s treasure was, he was the only one that 
did know, so we had to do what he planned. 

“How much green sand are you going to get?” I 
asked him. 

“One grain,” Jibby said. “ I need only one grain 
for my collection, so I’ll get only one grain.” 

And that was exactly like Jibby Jones. He 
thought he knew where there was a pirate treasure 
worth, maybe, thousands of dollars, and he would 

196 


PIRATE’S TREASURE 


put off getting it so that he could get one grain of 
sand. It looked foolish, but maybe it was the 
wisest way, after all. I guess it is. I guess the 
wisest thing is to make up your mind what you 
want, and then go for it, and keep on going for it 
until you get it. 


CHAPTER XIX 

THE TOUGH CUSTOMER APPEARS 

It was on Saturday that we found the 1804 dollar 
in the dry well of the cellar of the old Murrell farm¬ 
house. We knew that the dollar was worth a lot of 
money, and Jibby Jones said he thought it might be 
worth a thousand dollars, which would be two hun¬ 
dred dollars apiece for each of us. 

“But that’s nothing,” Jibby Jones told us. “If 
that John A. Murrell’s treasure is buried there, we 
may find a whole lot of money — perhaps thousands 
of dollars.” 

He said this while we were going back to River- 
bank in the dark. The dollar was all we had found, 
although we had searched the whole of the old brick 
house, but Jibby Jones had not helped us hunt; he 
had stood by an old pine tree doing nothing but 
thinking. He said he had to think where the land 
pirate or his man would most likely hide the treasure. 
And Jibby Jones said he had thought of the place. 

“I’ll tell you,” he said, as we went along toward 
home, “but you must not breathe a word of it. It 
won’t do to let anybody know about the treasure or 
anything. The rush for the Klondike gold fields 
would be nothing beside the rush the people here in 
Riverbank would make for that treasure, if they 
knew there was a treasure.” 

198 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER APPEARS 


“That’s right!” Wampus Smale said. “Every¬ 
body in town would pile out there and dig for it.” 

“Well, this is how I thought out where the treas¬ 
ure is,” Jibby said, and we all crowded close to him 
so that he would not have to talk very loud. “I 
leaned up against that old pine tree and I tried to 
imagine I was old John A. Murrell, the land pirate. 
That’s what you have to do if you want to get any¬ 
where in this world — you’ve got to imagine things.” 

Well, we stopped and had an argument right 
there! That sounded to us like the most foolish 
thing anybody could say — that the way to get any¬ 
where was to imagine something. 

“I don’t believe that,” Skippy Root said. “I be¬ 
lieve that the way to get anywhere is to start right 
out and go there, and I believe that the way to get 
anything is to start right after it and get it. It don’t 
do any good for real folks to imagine anything at 
all; it may be all right for poets and story-writers to 
imagine things and then write them — that’s their 
sort of business — but it is a waste of time for any¬ 
body else to go and imagine things.” 

“Is it?” Jibby Jones asked. “I didn’t know that. 
I always thought it was the other way.” 

Well, that made us stop a little. Jibby Jones 
wasn’t half such a fool as he looked, and we had 
found that out. At first we had sort of figured that 
he was a silly, because he was almost six feet tall and 
wore clothes that were mostly built for a five-foot 
boy, and because his shell-rimmed spectacles and 

199 


JIBBY JONES 


big, thin nose made him look like some foolish kind 
of bird, but somehow even the silliest things he ever 
said turned out to be pretty good solid sense. So 
now Tad Willing said: 

“What do you mean by you ‘always thought it 
was the other way,’ Jibby?” 

“Why, I always thought that nobody ever really 
did anything worth while until he had imagined 
something about it,’’ Jibby said. “ I always thought 
there was never a wagon until some man imagined 
there was an easier way of getting over the ground 
than walking over it. He imagined there might be 
some sort of wagon, and then he went to work and 
made one. If some one had not imagined that men 
might fly, there would never have been any air¬ 
planes.’’ 

“Well, I guess that’s so, anyway,” Tad ad¬ 
mitted. 

“Of course it is so!” Jibby said. “The only way 
the world gets ahead at all is by imagination. You 
take the phonograph, for an example. How do you 
suppose anybody ever happened to think of making 
a phonograph?” 

“Why—” Wampus Smale began, and then he 
stopped. 

It was as plain as day that nobody could sit 
down to invent a machine that would talk like a 
man and sing like a bird and play tunes like a band 
without first imagining such a machine. 

“There you are!” Jibby said. “A phonograph is 

200 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER APPEARS 


ninety-nine parts imagination and only one part 
solid stuff. Now, listen!” 

Jibby Jones held the 1804 dollar between his finger 
and thumb and hit it with his finger nail. It tinkled 
like a little silver bell. 

“You heard that, didn’t you?” he asked. “All 
five of us heard it. That means ten ears heard it. 
Well, for millions of years millions of ears were hear¬ 
ing millions of sounds before anybody sat down and 
wondered what a sound was and why an ear could 
hear it, and maybe it was thousands of years more 
before some man imagined his ears heard the sound 
because waves came through the air and hit his ear¬ 
drums. So then he went to work and proved it — he 
proved that if you hit a drum it makes one kind of 
sound waves, and if you scrape a fiddle it makes an¬ 
other kind, and if a bird sings it makes another kind. 
He proved that sound is vibration.” 

“Sure! I know that!” Wampus said, sort of 
scornful. 

“Edison knew it, too,” Jibby Jones said, “and he 
sat down one day, and took all he knew about sound 
and sound waves and vibrations, and wondered why 
a man couldn’t make any kind of noise or music or 
even human speech, if he could scrape a needle on 
something and make it vibrate and start the right 
kind of waves. He had imagination, Edison did. He 
imagined some sort of machine that would take a 
man’s voice and make it jiggle a needle so that the 
needle would make waves on tinfoil or something. 

201 


JIBBY JONES 


Tinfoil was what he used first. He talked his voice 
into a funnel so that its waves jiggled the needle 
and made waves on the tinfoil, and then he made 
the needle follow the waves in the tinfoil — little 
scratches, they were — and, sure enough, he heard 
his own voice talking back what he had just talked 
into the machine. And then he imagined a better 
machine with wax cylinders instead of tinfoil, and 
then — well, that’s how your phonograph got in¬ 
vented. Edison is ninety-nine parts imagination.” 

“Well, I guess that’s so,” said Tad. 

“More than half of the great inventions,” Jibby 
Jones said, “were made useful by some man who did 
not do the first inventing of them. Alexander Bell 
made the telephone so it was useful, but another 
man had done some telephone inventing first. The 
one man had enough imagination to imagine a toy 
telephone, but Alexander Bell had the imagination 
to imagine a telephone that would be useful to all 
the world.” 

“All right,” Wampus said. “That’s so, I guess, 
but you’re talking about great men now, Jibby. 
What good does imagination do us?” 

“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Jibby 
drawled in his slow way. “ I saw, right away, that a 
smart land pirate like John A. Murrell would not 
hide his money where you and George and Tad and 
Skippy would look for it. A man that could imagine 
a band of over one thousand men all pirating to¬ 
gether would not hide his treasure just anywhere. 

202 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER APPEARS 

i 

He would imagine a lot of things. He would imagine 
he might be caught and put in jail and kept there 
fifty years, maybe, and he would imagine some 
place where his treasure could be hid where he could 
find it in a minute, but no one else would think of 
looking for it.” 

“That sounds like good sense,” Skippy said. 

“Of course it does!” said Jibby Jones. “You 
make fun of imagination, but how did we first come 
to think of treasure being hid out there at that old 
farm?” 

“Why, you saw that old pine tree in the corner of 
the lot,” Wampus said. 

“Yes, and I imagined it might be one of John A. 
Murrell’s signal pines, such as he had planted in the 
corners of yards and farms all through Tennessee 
and Mississippi and Arkansas. I imagined that, 
didn’t I? There’s nothing souseful as imagination. 
So I stood by that old dead pine and imagined I was 
John A. Murrell, with a lot of stolen treasure, and 
that I was liable to be caught and kept in jail fifty 
years or more after the treasure was hidden. I knew 
right away that you would not find it in the house, 
because that would be exactly the first place any of 
the Murrell gang would look for it, if he wanted to 
cheat John A. Murrell while Murrell was in jail. 
Isn’t that so?” 

We had to admit that it was; the house was the 
first place we had looked, anyway. 

“So I imagined I was John A. Murrell, away 

203 


JIBBY JONES 


down in Arkansas, and that I wanted a true friend 
to hide my money here in Iowa, so that I could find 
it years later, even if the true friend was dead or 
had moved away, and even if the house had burned 
down and disappeared. I imagined I was John A. 
Murrell, getting out of jail and coming up the Mis¬ 
sissippi until I came to the mouth of the creek you 
said was Murrell’s Run. Then I remembered the 
green sand you said was in the bottom of Murrell’s 
Run near the farmhouse. So I imagined I came up 
the creek until I came to the green sand, and that 
was a sign to me to climb out of the creek and look 
for — what?” 

“The signal pine, of course,” said Skippy Root. 

“Certainly,” said Jibby Jones. “So I imagined I 
was standing there looking at the signal pine. Then 
I knew there was just one place where the treasure 
could be — it would be planted right at the root of 
the old signal pine. For that is what John A. Murrell 
would order: ‘Plant a signal pine at the comer of 
the farm, and bury the treasure at the foot of the 
pine.’ Even if John A. Murrell was dying, he could 
tell exactly where the treasure was, in a few words, 
and nobody could miss it. He might be in Asia, and 
he could send a man directly to it. ‘ Go up the Mis¬ 
sissippi until you come to a creek about five miles 
below Riverbank, Iowa. Go up the creek until you 
come to green sand. Climb the bank on your left and 
find a signal pine in the corner of a farm. Dig at the 
foot of the pine.’ ” 


204 



THE TOUGH CUSTOMER APPEARS 


Well, this might be wonderful imagination or it 
might be plumb nonsense, but out there in the dark, 
walking home past the cemetery, it sounded great 
to us. We all told Jibby he was a wonder, and he 
said he was not, that it was just ordinary common 
sense. 

“I don’t say the treasure is there,” he said mod¬ 
estly, “because some one may have dug it up, but if 
it is anywhere it is there, at the foot of that signal 
pine tree.” 

“But I’ll say you used some imagination,” said 
Skippy. 

“Oh, no!” Jibby said, still more modest. “That 
wasn’t much. I don’t call that much of anything. 
But maybe I can show you, sometime, what imagin¬ 
ation is worth.” 

So then we went on talking about the treasure 
and the 1804 dollar, and how we must not talk 
about it outside, but Jibby Jones said it would be all 
right to tell our fathers and mothers about it, be¬ 
cause they would not tell. We let Wampus Smale 
take the 1804 dollar home, because he said his 
mother had a silver wash that she used to dip silver 
things in to make them as bright as new. The 1804 
dollar was not worn smooth — it was as sharp as if 
it had just come from the mint — but it was as 
black as iron, and we thought it would be a good 
thing to have it brightened. 

We did not see how we could get out to the old 
Murrell farm to dig the treasure — if it was there — 

205 



JIBBY JONES 


before the next Saturday, so we decided on that, and 
then we went home. 

The sad thing happened the next morning — 
Sunday morning — when we were all going to Sun¬ 
day school together, and the Tough Customer was 
to blame. He lost the 1804 dollar for us. 

When Wampus got home that Saturday night, 
his folks were at supper and his father made him go 
and wash up and come right to the table, so he did. 
When he sat down at the table his father and mother 
were talking about Mary — their hired girl — and 
the man she had in the kitchen just then. 

“ Well,” Wampus’s mother was saying, “ I did not 
like the looks of him, but Mary said he was her 
cousin, so I said she could give him some supper in 
the kitchen.” 

“That’s all right, of course, for this one time,” 
Wampus’s father said then, “but don’t let the fellow 
hang around here. I think he is a tough customer, 
judging by his looks. He has a bad eye. If he had 
two eyes, I would say he had two bad eyes, but the 
one eye he has is bad enough to satisfy any one.” 

“I know,” Wampus’s mother said, “but I felt 
rather sorry for him because he has only one leg.” 

Wampus had been waiting for a chance to talk, 
because he was so eager to tell about the 1804 dollar 
and the treasure, and now he had the chance, and he 
lit into it. He handed the dollar to his father and 
went on to tell him about all of us finding it, and 
about Jibby Jones guessing there was hidden treas- 

206 


THE TOUGH CUSTOMER APPEARS 


ure, but he would not say where we had found the 
dollar nor where the treasure was. He was too 
smart for that, because just then Mary came in with 
the supper she had been keeping hot in the oven for 
him. She stood around and listened while they 
talked about the treasure and the 1804 dollar and 
how valuable it was, but Wampus did not think 
anything about that, because Mary had been their 
hired girl for a couple of years. 

“And how much treasure does your Jibby Jones 
think you will find?” Mr. Smale asked Wampus. 

“He don’t know,” Wampus said. “Maybe thou¬ 
sands of dollars. Maybe none. But, anyway, we’ve 
got this dollar and it ought to be worth almost a 
thousand dollars, Jibby says.” 

They went on talking it over, and Mr. Smale was 
sort of amused and did not believe in the treasure 
much, but Wampus wouldn’t say where we had been, 
or when we were going to dig for the treasure, and 
Mary went into the kitchen. So that was all of that. 

Then Wampus told his father and mother that 
the one-legged man Mary had in the kitchen was the 
Tough Customer that Orph Cadwallader had run off 
the island, but neither Mr. Smale nor Mrs. Smale 
seemed to think much about it. All Mr. Smale said 
was: “He had no business on the island, but I sup¬ 
pose it is all right for Mary to feed a cousin once 
in a while. How about it, mother?” 

“It has to be,” Mrs. Smale said; “it is so hard to 
get help these days.” 


CHAPTER XX 

ORLANDO 

The next morning we were on our way to Sunday 
school. I waited for Jibby and we picked up Wam¬ 
pus and Tad and Skippy, and we all had a good look 
at the 1804 dollar, because Wampus’s mother had 
dipped it and it was bright and beautiful. We passed 
it around and talked about it, and then we noticed 
the Tough Customer ahead of us. He did look 
tough, too, with his one peg-leg, and he swayed on 
his feet like a sailor — or on his one foot and one 
peg — and when he got to the corner he stood and 
waited. 

We had no use for him, and we did not want to 
talk to him, but when we came up to the Tough 
Customer he said “ Howdy!” to us. 

“Are you the boys that have that 1804 dollar?” 
he asked. 

“Yes, we are,” I said. 

“ My cousin told me about it,” he said. “She saw 
it in the dining-room last night. I’d like to have a 
look at it.” 

Wampus had the dollar. I wished the man had 
not stopped us; there was something about his stop¬ 
ping us that I did not like. To see him smiling and 
trying to be pleasant and nice to us gave me the 
.shivers, 

20 $ 


ORLANDO 


“ I know a man that wants to buy an 1804 dollar, 
boys,” he said. “I met him in St. Louis, only a 
couple of months ago, and he told me he would give 
more than the market price for one. ‘You travel 
about the world a lot,’ he said to me, ‘and you’re 
likely to run across one any day. If you do,’ he says, 
‘let me know. Only,’ he says, ‘ don’t try to fool me 
with no counterfeits, because I’m too wise for that.’ 
So he showed me how to tell the difference between 
a real one and a counterfeit one. I ain’t sure, but 
from what Mary told me I reckon you’ve got hold of 
a counterfeit one that some one threw away because 
it wasn’t worth a red cent. Let me see it; I can tell 
you in a minute.” 

So Wampus pulled our dollar out of his pocket and 
handed it to the Tough Customer. I had half an 
idea he meant to try to run away with it, and I got 
ready to make a dive for his wooden leg if he tried 
anything of that kind, but he did not. He just 
stood there, turning the dollar over and over be¬ 
tween his two fingers and his thumb. I guess Jibby 
Jones must have thought what I thought, for 
he sort of edged to the far side of the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer. 

“Well, I declare!” the Tough Customer said. “I 
would not have thought it! It is a genuine — ” 

And just then he dropped the dollar! It slipped 
between his thumb and his two fingers and I made a 
dive for it, and so did Wampus, but so did the 
Tough Customer, too, and we all three came to- 

209 


JIRBY JONES 


gether ker-plunk, and the dollar jangled on the 
grating and disappeared. 

For, you see, we were standing right over an iron 
grating that covered an opening into the Raccoon 
Creek sewer. The dollar went through the grating 
and into the sewer, and that was the last we ever 
saw of that dollar. The Tough Customer swore. He 
swore something that was awful to hear, and he got 
down on his knees and peered into the sewer, and 
then he moaned and groaned and said we would 
never forgive him, and he was about right about 
that — we never did. 

I don’t know how long we stood there, but a 
crowd began to gather — folks going to Sunday 
school, and men with the Sunday papers under their 
arms, and a couple of automobiles, and so we boys 
slipped away and left the Tough Customer explain¬ 
ing that he had dropped a dollar into the sewer, but 
he did not say it was an 1804 dollar. The folks 
laughed and said it was a gone dollar. 

I guess Sunday school did not do us much good 
that day. On the way home we talked about the 
chances of ever getting the 1804 dollar back — four 
of us did — but Jibby did not talk. We knew it was 
hopeless. The Raccoon Creek sewer is the main 
sewer in Riverbank and is really the whole of Rac¬ 
coon Creek cemented in and roofed over, and there 
was less chance of getting that dollar out of it than of 
finding a pinhead fired out of a rifle into the Desert 
of Sahara. The water was always two or three feet 


210 


ORLANDO 


deep and the mud a foot or two more. We decided 
there was no hope, and so Wampus said: 

“Well, it is gone; the next thing is to get the 
treasure. Maybe there will be a couple more 1804 
dollars in the treasure. We’ll get the treasure Sat¬ 
urday.” 

“Maybe!” Jibby Jones said. “I’ve got to do 
some thinking first, and I’ve got to find a good 
thinking place before I do any more thinking.” 

We tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use. 
He said he must think. Finally, he did say he ex¬ 
pected he could do all the thinking necessary before 
Saturday, if he found a first-class place to think in. 
That sounded foolish to me. 

“Can’t you think in one place as well as in 
another?” I asked him. 

“No,” he said, “of course not! There’s a best 
place for everything, and there ought to be a best 
place to think in, too. For the kind of think¬ 
ing I have to do I need a first-class thinking 
place.” 

So that afternoon we walked around looking for 
a thinking place for Jibby Jones. We tried about 
thirty different places, and Jibby would sit down 
and try them, but they did not satisfy him. Then 
we would try another, and finally he said Wampus 
Smale’s woodshed would do; he said it was as good 
as any man needed to think in. 

“ It is warm and clean and smells of sawdust and 
damp bark,” Jibby said, “and the boards of the 

211 


JIBBY JONES 


walls are wide enough for the air to ventilate 
through. I guess I can think first-rate here.” 

It sounded foolish to us, but you can never tell 
when Jibby is being foolish and when he is not, but 
mostly he is not, so we all sat down and tried to 
think. We changed from one seat to another, and 
when Jibby sat with his back to the wall that is 
right close to the alley he said that was the best 
place of all for high-grade thinking, and that we 
would come there every afternoon and do our think¬ 
ing. So, every afternoon, after school, we went 
there and Jibby sat and thought. 

But the rest of us mostly talked. Jibby said he 
did not mind our talking, and sometimes he joined 
in. We talked about the treasure, and about old 
John A. Murrell, and so on, and we planned to go 
out and get the treasure on Saturday, but when¬ 
ever any of us came near saying where the treas¬ 
ure was hidden, Jibby said “Hush!” and shut 
us up. 

It came along to Friday afternoon, and we had 
planned pretty much everything. Wampus was to 
take a spade, and Skippy was to get a pickaxe, and 
Tad was to take an axe. Jibby told me to have a 
length of rope ready. 

“And I’ll have my mother put up lunch for us,” 
he said, “for we may spend the whole day. We will 
all meet at my house at nine o’clock to-morrow 
morning. We’ll need a big lunch, because if we dig a 
lot we’ll be mighty hungry — ” 


212 


ORLANDO 


He stopped short. 

“Pshaw!” he said. “I forgot to feed Orlando!” 

“Orlando?” I asked, for this was the first time I 
had heard of any Orlando. “Who’s Orlando?” 

Jibby looked at me. 

“My goodness!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t I ever 
tell you about Orlando? That’s because we’ve had 
Orlando so long I never think much of him, I guess. 
Orlando is my father’s pet skunk.” 

We did not say anything. Mr. Jones is an author, 
and an author is liable to have almost any kind of 
pet. They are funny folks, mostly, I guess. 

“My father caught Orlando when Orlando was no 
bigger than a cat’s kitten,” Jibby Jones went on. 
“He caught Orlando in Pike County, Pennsylvania, 
and he raised Orlando on a bottle, and Orlando is as 
affectionate as a kitten. If you catch a skunk young 
and treat it right, it is the most affectionate pet you 
can have, and it makes the best kind of watchdog — 
if you can call a skunk a dog. We keep Orlando in 
the cellar, and I have to feed Orlando when my 
father does not. And father is away to-day and I 
forgot to feed Orlando. I’ll have to go home now 
and feed Orlando.” 

“Gee whiz!” Skippy said. “That’s a funny kind 
of pet. Don’t it ever — well, you know! — per¬ 
fumery?” 

“Oh, no, indeed!” Jibby drawled. “That’s where 
you do Orlando a great wrong, Skippy. If a skunk 
is fond of you, and knows you, it never bothers you 

213 


JIBBY JONES 


that way. It is only when a skunk is hostile to you 
that it bothers you that way.” 

“Has — has Orlando ever been hostile?” Wam¬ 
pus asked. 

“Yes, once,” Jibby said. “When we were in Kal¬ 
amazoo, Michigan, my father was sick and a one- 
legged barber named Horace L. Spurling used to 
come to the house to shave father. We had a peach 
tree in the side yard and the peaches were ripe, and 
one evening Horace L. Spurling thought he would 
steal a couple of peaches, and he climbed the fence 
and sneaked up to the tree, and Orlando was taking a 
nap under the tree, and Horace L. Spurling stepped 
on Orlando’s tail. For three days Horace L. Spurling 
was unconscious, and we had to bury his clothes six 
feet deep and cut down the peach tree and burn it, 
and move into another house two miles away. Ever 
since then Orlando has been hostile to one-legged 
men because Horace L. Spurling had one leg. I 
don’t think Orlando is hostile to men with two legs 
or to women, but he might be hostile to the Legless 
Lady in the circus. But I must go home now and 
feed Orlando.” 

“What do you do with Orlando when you are 
traveling?” Tad asked. 

“We carry him in a green cloth bag, so he can’t 
see whether there are any one-legs or not,” Jibby 
said. 

Then we all went home. I went with Jibby, be¬ 
cause we live near each other. 

214 


ORLANDO 


“ George,” he said, as we went along, “that Tough 
Customer was out behind Wampus’s woodshed, lis¬ 
tening. I thought he would be. I picked out that 
woodshed on purpose, because the Tough Customer 
could hear us through the cracks in it. And we have 
no skunk at our house. We’ve got a black-and- 
white cat we call Orlando. But imagination is a 
great thing, George. I said it was. I imagined, for 
a while, that Orlando was a skunk.” 

I laughed. I thought Jibby was trying to be 
funny. 

“I didn’t want to bother Wampus and Tad 
and Skippy, George,” Jibby said, “but we’ve got 
some work to do to-night. Come to my house 
right after supper and bring a lantern. I have 
one, too.” 

He would not say any more, so after supper I took 
my lantern and went to Jibby’s. We walked out to 
the old Murrell farm, and when we got there we 
went into the tumbledown old brick farmhouse and 
down into the cellar, where the dry well was. The 
old rotten boards were just as we had left them last 
Saturday, and Jibby Jones put them over the well, 
fixing them carefully, and sprinkled dry dirt all 
over them. 

“I saw the natives make an elephant trap in 
India this way once,” he said. “ I saw them catch a 
wild elephant. He was a tough customer.” 

“You don’t think you’ll catch an elephant here, 
do you?” I asked him. 


215 


JIBBY JONES 


“No,” Jibby said, “but I expect I may catch a 
Tough Customer.” 

So then we went home. The next morning we 
were all on hand at nine o’clock at Jibby’s, and we 
started for the Murrell farm. We hiked along at a 
good rate, saying “hep! hep! hep!” to keep in step, 
or singing something to keep step by. We had all 
the things Jibby had told us to bring, and he had a 
big market-basket with a lid. 

“It is all right,” Jibby whispered to me once. 
“The Tough Customer is following us.” 

About half a mile this side of the Murrell farm, 
Jibby said he was tired and sat down by the side of 
the road to rest. There was a long osage orange 
hedge there, and we sat with it behind us. 

“Now, listen,” he said, when we were seated. 
“Before we get to work to dig that treasure, we’ll 
go to the Run and get some of that green sand for 
my collection. It won’t take half an hour; we’ll have 
plenty of time. Nobody is going to guess that the 
treasure is under the bottom of the old dry well in 
the cellar of the old brick farmhouse at the cross¬ 
roads where the broken, dead pine tree is.” 

“ But — ” said Wampus. 

“You be still!” Jibby said. “Sometimes I think 
you talk too much. I’m hungry. I’m going to eat 
something.” 

He opened the basket and gave us each a 
sandwich, and they did taste good! We sat there 
eating. 


216 


ORLANDO 


“But you said the treasure was under the pine 
tree,” Wampus said then. 

“Yes, I said that, and that is where it is,” Jibby 
Jones said then, “but just now the Tough Customer 
was behind the hedge here listening, and I wanted 
him to think it was in the well in the cellar. But 
now we can talk; he is not here now. Look up the 
road.” 

Sure enough, there was the Tough Customer, 
hobbling along in a great hurry, trying to keep out 
of sight and going toward the old Murrell place. 

“Let him get in the house,” Jibby said, and then 
he opened the lid of his market-basket again and 
took out a green felt bag. He loosened the strings 
and a cat stuck its black-and-white head out of the 
bag. 

“Good old Orlando!” Jibby said, and stroked the 
cat’s head. 

He handed the bag to Wampus. 

“You carry the cat, Wampus,” he said, “and 
when I ask for it you hand it to me. Now, come on, 
and let’s hurry.” 

We did. We started up the road at a good clip, 
and when we reached the old Murrell place the 
Tough Customer was not in sight, but when we had 
stolen up to the house we heard a clatter of old 
boards and a yell, and we all piled into the cellar. 
The Tough Customer had stepped on the boards 
that covered Jibby’s elephant trap and they had 
tipped and fallen into the dry well and the Tough 

217 


JIBBY JONES 


Customer had gone with them. He was swearing 
and jumping and trying to get out of the well, but 
it was too deep for him to get out without some one 
to pull him out or boost him out. When he saw us, 
he let loose all the language he could think of, and 
he told us all the things he would do to us if he ever 
got out of that hole. 

Jibby stood and looked down at him. 

“Wampus,” Jibby said, in his slow, drawling 
way, “hand me Orlando.” 

Wampus handed Jibby Jones the green felt bag. 

“Now, you boys had better get out of the cellar 
and, maybe, out of the house,” Jibby said, “because 
it may not be very pleasant when I put Orlando 
down the well. Orlando is hostile to men with 
wooden legs. Orlando don’t like wooden legs.” 

“Look here!” the Tough Customer begged, 
changing his tone in an instant. “You’re not going 
to dump that cussed animal down here, are you? 
Please don’t. Don’t you be so cruel to a feller that 
never did anybody any harm. Please! I’d rather 
be licked a dozen times than have that animal — ” 

“Hurry, boys!” Jibby said. “There’s going to be 
a grand time here. I shouldn’t wonder if Orlando 
bit this man, too, besides other happenings.” 

Jibby opened the neck of the bag. 

“Wooden legs, Orlando!” he said, when the cat 
put its head out. 

“Look here!” the Tough Customer whined from 
down in the well. “Don’t do it! Don’t let that 

218 


/ 



I 


H 

D 

O 


THE WELL AND PULLED THE TOUGH CUSTOMER 












ORLANDO 

animal loose on me. I’ll give you — I’ll give you 
anything you say.” 

“Well, I don’t know,” Jibby said. “ I sort of hate 
to miss the fun. But, I don’t know. I might be will¬ 
ing to dicker. How about a dollar? How about an 
1804 dollar?” 

“ I haven’t got — ” the man began. 

“Scoot, boys!” Jibby shouted. “Here she goes! 
Sic him, Orlando!” 

“I’ll give it! I’ll give it!” the Tough Customer 
yelled, and — plunk! — on the hard dirt at Jibby’s 
feet the 1804 dollar fell. Jibby picked it up and 
looked at it. It was our dollar, right enough. 

Jibby pushed the cat’s head back into the green 
bag and tied the strings and put the bag in the 
basket. Then he made Wampus with his spade and 
Tad with his axe stand ready to take care of the 
Tough Customer if he tried any funny tricks, and 
Skippy and I threw an end of the rope into the well 
and pulled the Tough Customer out. He did not 
wait to talk; he gave one look at the basket and 
scooted out of that cellar. 

We piled out after him, because we did not want 
him throwing any bricks or rocks down on us, but 
we saw him hobbling down the road as fast as his 
wooden leg would carry him, and we whooped and 
laughed and patted Jibby Jones on the back. 

“That’s nothing!” he said. “I saw a man palm a 
dollar once in a sleight-of-hand show, so I had some 
experience that way. And I just imagined Orlando 

219 


JIBBY JONES 


was a skunk for this afternoon only. I sort of im¬ 
agined that Tough Customer was not going to let an 
1804 dollar drop down a sewer. It looked too smart, 
to have him standing right over that grating. So 
that’s all there is to it — experience and imagina¬ 
tion.” 

And that’s so. They do make a mighty good 
team. When you have Experience and Imagination 
hitched up together, you can do almost anything. I 
was thinking that when Orlando, in the bag, gave a 
yowl. 

Jibby Jones grinned. 

“Orlando wants to go home,” he said. And he 
took the bag out of the basket and took the cat out 
of the bag. He dropped Orlando on the ground, and 
the cat started for home at a good trot. The cat 
took to the road, and presently the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer looked back, and he saw Orlando trotting 
along toward him. He gave one yell and dived over 
a fence, and the last we saw of him that day was 
while he was scooting across a ploughed field as hard 
as he could scoot. 


CHAPTER XXI 

WINGED ENEMIES 

It must have been about half-past ten or eleven 
o’clock in the morning by the time we got rid of the 
Tough Customer that had come to the old Murrell 
farm to get the land pirate’s buried treasure before 
we could get it. We stood there by the old brick 
house laughing and shouting while Jibby Jones’s 
cat Orlando chased the Tough Customer off the 
road. 

When we saw the Tough Customer vanish over a 
rise of ground, the rest of our work of getting the 
buried treasure — if there was any — seemed as 
simple as opening a pie to pull out a plum. We had 
the rest of the morning and all afternoon and part of 
the evening to work in, and Jibby Jones had figured 
out that the buried treasure must be under the old 
signal pine tree in the corner, near where the two 
roads crossed. 

“Come on!” I said. “Now we can get it; there’s 
not a thing that can stop us.” 

And that was how it looked to me. There we were, 
Jibby Jones and Wampus Smale and Tad Willing 
and Skippy Root and myself, and we had enough 
lunch to last all day, and we had a spade and a pick 
and an axe and a long rope. It did look as if getting 
that treasure would be the easiest thing in the 

221 


JIBBY JONES 


world. I felt as if my hands were already scooping 
up gold money and silver money and letting it drip 
through my fingers. 

I can’t hardly tell you how simple it seemed to get 
that buried treasure, and how easy. Just try your¬ 
self to see how easy it looked to me. Just behind us 
was the rotted old brick farmhouse where Jibby said 
the treasure was not hidden. Over yonder was the 
dead pine tree in the corner of the lot — the tree 
Jibby Jones said was the signal pine, under which 
the pirate’s treasure was probably buried — and 
between was nothing but a few rods of ground with 
weeds and tall grass on it. And we had the digging 
tools. All we had to do was walk across to the dead 
pine tree and dig. So I said so. 

“Come on!” I said. “Let’s hurry and get that 
treasure before anybody else comes along to bother 
us.” 

But Jibby Jones did not pick up the lunch- 
basket or make any move toward the dead pine tree. 
He stood and smoothed his nose with his forefinger. 

“No,” he said, “let’s take a swim first. Let’s go 
to the creek and find a swimming-pool and take 
a swim.” 

“We can’t,” I said. “There never was a swim¬ 
ming-pool in Murrell’s Run, and there isn’t one 
now.” 

“I don’t know,” Jibby said. “Up in the Catskill 
Mountains there are streams, and sometimes there 
is no pool in a place, and the next year there is one. 


222 


WINGED ENEMIES 


You can’t always tell, George. I’m lucky about 
pools; when I want to swim there usually is one.” 

“Well, you won’t find one on Murrell’s Run,” I 
said. But I ought to have known better; a fellow 
never ought to say what Jibby Jones will find or 
won’t find. 

“Come on! Let’s dig for the treasure,” Skippy 
Root said. “You act as if you were afraid to, Jibby.” 

Jibby did not answer this directly. He rubbed his 
nose and looked at Wampus Smale. 

“Your father owns this land, don’t he, Wampus?” 
he asked. 

“Yes, he owns all of it,” Wampus said. 

“And who lives in the new farmhouse at the other 
end of the farm?” Jibby asked. 

“Why, Bill Catlin,” Wampus said. “He rents 
from father. What has that got to do with it?” 

Jibby rubbed his nose again, and I thought I saw 
him grin. 

“What kind of lights does he use?” Jibby asked. 

“What do you mean?” Wampus asked. “I don’t 
know what you are talking about.” 

“I mean lights,” said Jibby Jones. “Lights for 
the evening, when he is sitting at a table reading the 
Farmers’ Almanac or something. You know what 
lights are, don’t you, Wampus? The Romans had 
oil lights, and my great-great-grandmother had 
whale-oil lights, and in New England they once used 
tallow dips. Does Bill Catlin use kerosene lamps or 
electric light or gas light?” 

223 


JIBBY JONES 


“What are you trying to do, tease me?” Wampus 
asked. “Bill Catlin uses kerosene lamps, of course. 
There is no gas out here, and there are no electric 
lights this far out.” 

“All right,” Jibby said. “That’s good. That’s 
fine. Is Bill Catlin a cross fellow, or is he a pleasant 
fellow?” 

“Oh, come on!” Wampus said, disgusted. “Let’s 
dig; what’s the use of trying to be funny?” 

“All right,” Jibby said. “I don’t pretend to be 
the one leader of this band of treasure-hunters. Go 
on and dig, if you want to. I’m not ready to dig yet; 
I’m going down to the Run and get a specimen of 
the green sand you said was there. I’m more inter¬ 
ested in getting a specimen of that sand for my col¬ 
lection than I am in buried treasure just now.” 

Sure enough, he started off toward where the rim 
of trees showed where Murrell’s Run was. It was 
just what you might expect Jibby Jones to do, 
right when the buried treasure was in our hands, 
almost. Tad called to him. 

“Jibby!” he called. “Come back here!” 

Anybody else that acted that way we would have 
let go, but Jibby Jones was different. He looked 
like a ninny, with his long thin nose and his high- 
water pants and his spectacles, but he had fooled us 
more than once that way. It was when he said or 
did the biggest fool things — or what seemed like 
the biggest fool things to us — that you had to stop 
and think the hardest, because Jibby Jones always 

224 


WINGED ENEMIES 


had something important in his mind then. So, when 
Tad called to him, Jibby came back. 

“You must excuse me if I seem rude,” he said, 
“but I really cannot dig for treasure until Wampus 
tells me whether Bill Catlin is a pleasant fellow or a 
cross fellow.” 

“Why?” I asked. 

Jibby looked up at the air and down at the 
grass. 

“My father has told me many, many times that 
the way to keep out of trouble is to use my eyes and 
my brains,” he said. “I’m afraid you boys do not do 
that as much as you should. The reason I must 
know whether Bill Catlin is a cross fellow or a 
pleasant fellow is because that Tough Customer, 
when he was running away from here#yipped three 
times and hopped five feet on his wooden leg.” 

We tried to think that over, but we could not 
make sense of it in any way. 

Wampus got sort of angry. 

“Oh, well! If you’re going to talk nonsense!” he 
said. “ It is all right for a smarty to be smart some¬ 
times, but I don’t call this one of the times. You 
fellows may stand it, but I’m not going to. I’m going 
to dig up that treasure, if it is there, and Jibby can 
go and scrape up green sand if he wants to. He can’t 
make a fool of me!” 

“ I do want to get a specimen of that sand,” Jibby 
said soberly. “And, when you have dug treasure 
awhile, you boys had better come down to the Run. 

225 


JIBBY JONES 


It is too dry up here. I expect there is plenty of 
mud in the Run.” 

With that Jibby went off. We watched him go. 

“ I don’t like it,” I said. “ I’ll bet Jibby has some¬ 
thing in his mind that we don’t know anything 
about. I’m going with him. When Jibby Jones talks 
like a crazy man, you want to look out; he’s always 
talking sense then.” 

So I started to follow Jibby, but Wampus Smale 
called me back, and the three of them — Wampus 
and Tad and Skippy — talked to me and said we 
would all look silly if we let Jibby Jones scare us with 
a lot of nonsense talk. By the time they had talked 
enough, Jibby was going out of sight, so I made up 
my mind I would stick to the fellows. We picked up 
our tools and started for the dead pine tree. 

I was worried a little, even though it all looked as 
simple as crossing a room to pick up a paper. It 
seemed that there must be something about the 
green sand in the Run that meant more than we 
thought, or something else. I rather knew that 
Jibby would not go off to get a grain of sand for his 
collection just then, when the treasure was so near, 
unless he had something worth while in his mind. I 
remembered what he had said about the green sand 
being, perhaps, the marks to show the old land 
pirate’s men the way to the buried treasure — “Go 
up the Mississippi until you come to a creek five 
miles below Riverbank; go up the creek until you 
come to green sand in the creek bottom; then 

226 


WINGED ENEMIES 


climb the right bank of the creek and find a signal 
pine, and dig under the pine.” That was what 
Jibby had thought out as the directions old John A. 
Murrell might have given back in 1835. I was 
worried, but I did not have the slightest idea what 
Jibby’s real idea of the trouble to come was. 

We walked over to the dead pine and talked for 
a minute about the best way to begin. Wampus 
wanted to take the pick and dig right into the baked 
soil, but Skippy had another idea of it. 

“When this pine was planted,” he said, “it must 
have been a very small one, and if Murrell’s men 
buried the treasure under it they must have buried 
it close to the tree. Then the tree grew, and now, 
probably, the treasure is right under the tree, or 
under its big roots. I think we can save time by tak¬ 
ing the axe and cutting down the tree.” 

“Oh, now you are talking like Jibby Jones!” 
Wampus said, and it was easy to see that he was 
plumb disgusted with Jibby Jones. “Go ahead and 
chop, if you want to; I’m going to dig.” 

He raised his pick above his head and brought it 
down hard into the dry soil, and Skippy swung the 
axe and chopped into the dead pine tree. Almost 
that same instant Tad Willing jumped about four 
feet into the air and yelped like a scalded dog, and 
when he hit the ground he grabbed his ankle and 
yelped again, and then broke for the brick house at 
about forty miles an hour, batting at his head and 
yipping like an Indian. 

227 


JIBBY JONES 

And Skippy and Wampus Smale were not far be¬ 
hind him. 

“Wouch!” Wampus cried, and Skippy yelled, 
“Ow-wow! Bumblebees! Owp!” And they went 
for the brick house in big jumps. I did not have to 
look at them to learn how to lope, either. I was al¬ 
ready on my way, and the thing I said when the first 
bumblebee jabbed his stinger into the back of my 
neck was not “I beg your pardon!” I don’t know 
what it was. I was too busy to notice. I said what I 
had to say and I did what I thought was the best 
thing to do, and I did not bother to put on any 
trimmings. 

Along in May you can’t pick up a bumblebee and 
kiss it, because affection of that sort is one thing a 
bumblebee does not understand much about, but a 
May bumblebee is a gentle violet alongside of a 
September bumblebee. By September a bumblebee 
is as grouchy as a snake with a sore tail, and is just 
aching to stick his stinger into somebody. I suppose 
a bumblebee spends the whole summer sharpening 
its stinger and getting ready for battle, and by 
September it wants war. And this was the meanest 
day of September for hostile bumblebees. There 
were about ten million of them in the nest under 
that old pine tree, and every bumblebee was fully 
ripe and as big as a plum, and it seemed as if they 
had let their stingers lie out in the sun until they 
were red-hot. It was the meanest lot of bees I ever 
got acquainted with. Bees that would have flown 

228 


WINGED ENEMIES 


aside to get out of your way in May were now so 
eager to jab a boy that, if one of them had been on 
its way from New York to Boston to attend its 
grandmother’s funeral, it would have swerved aside 
to Los Angeles, California, to sting a brass Cupid on 
a fountain. 

When we gathered our scattered forces together 
in the old brick farmhouse, I had five stings in me, 
and Skippy had eight lumps that were like young 
mountains and still growing, and Tad had seven 
honorable wounds and one bee still skirmishing in 
the thick growth on his head, and Wampus — well, 
Wampus would not stand still long enough to let us 
count him. A couple of bees had gone down inside of 
his shirt and Wampus was disrobing by jerks. He 
yanked at the collar of his shirt so hard that a pearl 
button flew eight feet and hit Tad on the neck and 
Tad jumped and yelled. He thought it was another 
bee come to bury a red-hot bayonet in him. 

Three bees — some of the cavalry, I suppose — 
had followed us to turn our retreat into a rout, and 
they came right into the old brick house without 
knocking, and for three minutes Tad and Skippy and 
I had all we needed to do whacking at those bees 
with our caps. Then one of them stung Tad and was 
satisfied, and the other two took Wampus’s bare 
back as an insult, and Wampus yipped twice more. 

Then there was silence, except for low moans and 
loud “Ow-wow-wows!” Wampus began to cry. I 
suppose he felt like one of the devastated regions 

229 


JIBBY JONES 


after the Germans had shot it full of shell-holes. 
Skippy was the first to show any sense. 

“Gee whiz!” he said, hopping on one leg. “I’m 
stinging all over! This is no place to be. We’ve got 
to get to where there is some cool mud to daub on 
these stings.” 

Right then I knew why Jibby Jones had said that 
we had better follow him to the Run after we had 
dug treasure awhile, and why he had said it was too 
dry by the pine tree, and why he had said there was 
plenty of mud in the Run. 

We trotted toward the Run as fast as we could, 
because every sting was doing its best to bum, and 
as we went I began to see the best kind of good 
sense in every word Jibby had said that we had 
thought was foolish. He wanted to go to the green 
sand because that place was far from the bumble¬ 
bees, and he knew there were bumblebees at the old 
pine tree because the Tough Customer had yipped 
and sprinted when he passed close to it. And there 
was sense in what he had asked about Bill Catlin, 
too. If Bill Catlin was a good-natured fellow and 
burned kerosene, he would lend us a can of kerosene 
and we could burn out the bees before we began to 
dig. 

I tried to tell this to the fellows, but they did not 
pay much attention. They were in a hurry. We all 
piled in among the trees and down the bank of the 
Run, and there was Jibby Jones. He was sitting on 
a large flat rock, in the cool shade, and on the rock 

230 


WINGED ENEMIES 


were about forty nice little mud pies he had made 
and put there, each one nice and cool and soppy, all 
ready to plaster on our bee stings! 

Jibby Jones looked up when we came piling down 
to where he was. 

“ I’ve got forty-two made,” he said. “ I thought I 
would make sixty, but you came sooner than I 
thought you would. Help yourselves.” 

We did. We grabbed the mud plasters and slapped 
them on the hot bee stings, and Jibby Jones helped 
us. Oh, boy! but that cool wet mud felt fine! Jibby 
plastered the stings on Wampus Smale’s back him¬ 
self, and Wampus never said a word about any one 
talking foolish talk. He just said: 

“Ah! that feels good! Oh! that feels good! Put 
on another fresh one, Jibby.” 



i 


CHAPTER XXII 

A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE 

By and by we began to sting less and to feel better. 

“Did you bring the tools?” Jibby asked, inno¬ 
cently. 

“I should say not!” Skippy said. “What was the 
use? A bee can’t sting an axe.” 

“Those bees could,” I said. “ I expect that spade 
will be all swelled up like a balloon by the time we 
see it again.” 

That made Wampus laugh, which was a sign he 
was feeling better, too. I told Jibby I knew now 
why he wanted to know if Bill Catlin was a good- 
natured man. 

“Yes,” Jibby said, “ I thought you would figure it 
out sooner or later.” 

“Well, the next time,” I said, “don’t be so polite. 
Don’t treat us as if we had any sense at all. Make a 
picture of a bee and shove it in our faces.” 

“Yes, do!” Skippy said. “I’d rather, any day, 
have a picture of a bee shoved in my face than have 
a real bee shove itself in my neck.” 

That made us all laugh, and Jibby washed the 
mud off Wampus Smale’s back, and when Wampus 
had put on his clothes we sat down and had lunch. 
I never ate anything that tasted better, and when 

232 


A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE 


we had finished we lay back for a while, just feeling 
good. Jibby Jones laughed. 

‘‘Laughing at us?” I asked. 

“No,” he said. “I’m laughing at myself. I’m 
thinking what a silly I was to begin collecting sand 
from everywhere, and thinking one grain from each 
place would be enough. I’ve been looking at this 
sand through my magnifying-glass, and one grain 
won’t do.” 

“Why not?” I asked. 

“Look at it,” he said, and he tossed me his mag¬ 
nifying-glass. 

The minute I looked at the sand through the glass 
I saw what he meant. Each grain stood out like the 
setting of a ring, and each grain was transparent, 
and sparkled, but not one grain was green! About 
half the grains were yellow and the other half were 
blue. It was only because they were so small and so 
mixed together that the sand looked green, because 
yellow and blue mixed makes green. I handed the 
glass to Wampus, and he looked and passed it on un¬ 
til we had all seen that the green sand was not green 
sand at all, but yellow sand and blue sand mixed. 

After a while Jibby yawned. 

“Well,” he said, “if we are going to get that 
treasure, we had better be stirring ourselves. Wam¬ 
pus, is Bill Catlin a good-natured man or is he — ” 

“Aw, quit!” Wampus said, and turned as red as 
his bee stings. “ Bill Catlin is all right. He will lend 
us a can of kerosene quick enough.” 

233 


JIBBY JONES 


So we fixed it that we would go up to Bill Catlin’s 
and get an oil can and some kerosene. Jibby said 
he would not go. 

“Bill don’t know me,” he said, “and he might get 
frightened if he saw my nose.” 

That was a joke, of course, and we coaxed Jibby 
to go with us, but he would not go. I think he 
wanted to punish us for not paying attention to him 
when he tried to tell us in his own way about the 
bees. He made one excuse after another. He said he 
looked such a silly that Bill would be afraid to trust 
us with kerosene if he was along. He said a lot of 
things like that. Finally he said we had better go 
without him. 

“You needn’t take so long,” he said, “because 
you can all run fast. I know, because I heard you 
running.” 

We left him lying there and went up through the 
woods to Bill Catlin’s. He was not at home, but his 
wife was a nice lady and let us have a gallon can full 
of kerosene. We stopped to eat a few grapes in Bill 
Catlin’s vineyard, to keep them from going to waste, 
and then we started across a field toward the woods 
again, but we had hardly climbed the fence when we 
saw Jibby coming toward us. He was on a slow lope, 
and he waved us back, so we stopped short and 
waited until he came up to us. 

“Wait!” he said, and then he waited until he got 
his breath. “We’ve got to be careful now. The 
enemy is at the green sands.” 

234 


A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE 


I laughed. I thought he meant the bees had come 
down there, or that, maybe, Jibby had run into an¬ 
other nest of them, but it was not that, and it was 
worse than anything we had ever thought could 
happen. 

Jibby had been lying there on the bank by the 
green sands waiting for us when, all at once, he 
heard voices — men’s voices. They were the voices 
of men coming up the Run, and one or two were 
complaining that this could not be the right creek, 
and that they had come more than far enough up 
it, but others said they had better be sure and go a 
little farther to see whether there was any green 
sand. 

Jibby put everything that was left of the lunch 
back in the basket and crept up the bank of the Run 
and hid the basket. Then he edged along down to 
where the men were and took a peek at them from 
the top of the bank. There were ten of them, seven 
white men and three negroes, and one of the white 
men had red hair and a scar over his eye. The 
negroes were loaded down with bags and bundles. 
They had stopped, and the negroes were complain¬ 
ing that they had carried that stuff far enough for 
one day. They said there was no hurry, and that the 
treasure would not get away after it had remained 
right in one place almost a hundred years, they 
guessed, and that it was no use working black men 
to death, anyway. 

Then the Red-Headed Bandit swore. 

235 


JIBBY JONES 


“You-all look mighty sharp you don’t let any¬ 
thing happen to that provender,” he said. “I’m a 
bad man when I get riled. I’m the great-grandson of 
my great-grandfather, and he killed more men than 
there are kinky hairs on all your worthless heads, 
and I don’t mind killing three more blacks right 
now, and I’ll do it if you let that food stuff get 
harmed.” 

The other men growled and scowled at the blacks, 
too, then, and the negroes mumbled and scolded in 
low voices. 

“Tell you what, Jim,” one of them said, “I 
reckon I feel about like these darks feel. We don’t 
know that this creek is Murrell’s Run nohow. We 
might go up and up and get to nowhere in the end. 
You’s pushin’ us too hard and steady, Jim. To¬ 
morrow is another day.” 

“Yes, and who knows how long we’ve got to be 
huntin’ for that treasure, Jake?” the man called 
Jim answered. “We ain’t got none too much food 
fora big gang like this, Jake. We-all can’t be skir¬ 
mishing around the country for food, Jake, when 
we’re on an exhibition like this.” 

He meant expedition. 

“No,” Jake said, “but we can’t walk up every 
creek to the No’th Pole, Jim, either. We ain’t no 
Stefanssons or Pearys.” 

They did not look like it, either, Jibby said. The 
seven whites looked like the mountaineers he and 
his father had seen in the Ozarks — Hill-Billies they 

236 


A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE 

call them down there. They looked like the laziest 
lot that ever lived. 

“Well, I’ll tell you what, Jake,” Jim said then. 
“ Let the darks dump their stuff here, and we’ll go on 
up the creek a ways and sort of speculate around. 
That’s fair.” 

“You white folks want to walk our foots off! ” one 
of the blacks said then, but he put down his load. 

“Hey, there, you!” Jim shouted. “Heft that 
stuff down easy, can’t you? Ain’t I told you often 
enough there’s dynamite in that bag?” 

“I shore did heft it easy, boss,” the negro said. 
“I don’t heft no dynamite down hard.” 

They talked awhile longer, and the white men 
decided to let the negroes stay to watch the dun¬ 
nage, and they started off up the creek. The three 
black men stretched out on the yellow sand in the 
sun and got ready to go to sleep, and then Jibby stole 
away and came for us. 

“Aw, pshaw!” Wampus said. “That ends it! 
Those men have dynamite and everything and 
they’ll get that treasure, and we’re beaten out of it! ” 

“Maybe!” Jibby said. “I don’t know yet. I re¬ 
member when I was in New Orleans with my father 
and we went down to the levee and a bale of cotton 
rolled over.” 

“What has that got to do with it?” Wampus 
asked. 

“Why, a negro was asleep, stretched out on the 
ground,” Jibby said, “and the bale of cotton rolled 

237 


JIBBY JONES 

on top of him and across him and then off of him 
again.” 

“Did it kill him?” Skippy asked. 

“No,” Jibby said. “That isn’t it. I was just tell¬ 
ing you how one of those Southern negroes sleeps 
when he stretches out in the sun. This one just 
brushed his hand across his face and said, ‘Shoo fly! 
go ’way! ’ and went on sleeping. Sleeping is the best 
thing some of those negroes do.” 

“Well, what?” I asked. 

“Nothing much,” Jibby said. “ I was only think¬ 
ing that the coming of this gang of treasure-hunters 
is the best luck we’ve had yet. We only guessed 
there was treasure here; now we know it. Now all 
we have to do is get rid of these men.” 

“And that is so easy! Only ten of them!” I said. 

“Well, I am surprised at you, George,” Jibby 
drawled. “You talk as if they were ten bumble¬ 
bees.” 

“But how are we going to get rid of them?” 
Wampus asked. 

Jibby fondled his nose gently. 

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “they won’t like it 
here and will go away without being asked to go.” 

Well, I didn’t like it much, but Jibby picked up 
the oil can and started for the woods along the Run, 
and, of course, a fellow could not hang back, so we 
all went. When we were near the edge of the bank, 
we all got down and wiggled forward until we could 
look over the edge and down at the place where the 

238 


A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE 


three negroes were asleep. They were sound asleep, 
too plenty of sound, if you mean the sound of 
snoring. 

The bank was about twelve feet high there, but 
not straight up and down. It slanted toward the 
creek and was covered with grass and weeds and a 
few small bushes as creek banks usually are. The 
dunnage of the treasure-hunters was piled in one pile 
close to where the foot of the bank met the sandy 
stretch on which the three black men were asleep. 
We looked down awhile, and then wiggled back and 
got to our feet and went off a few yards to hold a 
council. 

“We’ll take a bunch of rocks and slam them down 
on those men,” Wampus said. “We’ll scare the life 
out of them.” 

Jibby was hunting around in the bushes, but just 
then he found what he was looking for — his cov¬ 
ered lunch-basket. He took out the green felt bag 
his cat Orlando had been in and pulled the stout 
drawstring out of the hem at the mouth of the bag. 
He tried this over his knee, to see if it was strong, 
and it was strong. 

We were whispering, saying how we could stone 
those three men, but Jibby unbuttoned his shirt and 
pulled it over his head and began tearing strips off 
it. He tied the strips together and tested them at the 
knots, until he had eight or ten feet of it. Then he 
picked up the oil can and motioned us to follow him. 
None of us knew what he was going to do, but we 

239 


JIBBY JONES 


followed him back to the edge of the bank like little 
lambs. We had had enough lessons that day to 
know that Jibby Jones mostly knew what he was 
doing before he started to do it. 

When we got to the edge of the bank, Jibby stood 
up quietly and took hold of a young birch tree that 
stood near the edge of the bank and bent it back, 
away from the bank, until it was almost flat on the 
ground. He motioned Wampus to come and hold it 
down for him, and then he went and looked down at 
the dunnage again, and came back and eyed the 
birch stem and tied the oil can to the stem by its 
handle. He used the stout string from the green bag. 
Then he tied one end of the string he had made from 
the strips of shirt to the bottom of the oil can. 

When Jibby had done all this, I began to see what 
he was up to, and, for once in my life, I guessed 
right. We let the birch straighten up slowly and 
then pushed it down again, but this time toward the 
creek, so it stuck out over the bank, and Tad and 
Wampus and Skippy and I bore around on it until 
it held the can of kerosene exactly over the pile of 
dunnage and food and stuff down below. Then 
Jibby pulled on the string he had made of the shirt 
strips and the oil can tipped, and all the oil poured 
out of the can onto the food and other stuff in 
the treasure-hunters’ pile. Then we let the tree 
straighten up slowly again. It was a good job. It 
had spoiled all that food, because nothing spoils 
food more than having coal oil on it. We knew 

240 


A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE 


from what the treasure-hunters had said that they 
could not stay there long now; they would have to 
go away and get more food, probably down the 
river somewhere. 

I would have called that a good job and well done, 
but you can never tell what Jibby Jones has in his 
mind. He was taking the pieces of old newspaper 
out of his lunch-basket and getting handfuls of dry 
grass, and balling it all up into a big ball, and, when 
he had done this, he tied the ball around and around 
with the string he had made of shirt strips. 

None of us knew what he was up to, so we just 
stood and looked, but, when he had the ball all 
made, he untied the oil can and let the last of the 
kerosene dribble on the ball. Then he tied the ball 
to the birch, but a little higher than the can had 
been tied. 

“Now,” he said, “who has a match?” 

We all looked, but we did not have a match; not 
even a broken one, and for a minute Jibby looked 
pretty blue. 

“I ought to have thought of matches,” he said. 
“When a man goes treasure-hunting he ought to 
think of everything. I had a bully scheme. I was 
going to light this fire ball and bend the birch down 
until it touched that pile of stuff I spilled the kero¬ 
sene on, and light the whole pile. I don’t know what 
would have happened, but it would have been some¬ 
thing. Maybe the stuff would have burned and 
maybe the dynamite would have gone off. It would 

241 


JIBBY JONES 


have bothered those fellows a lot, anyway. But 
now we have no matches.” 

“ If we had a flint and some steel,” Wampus said, 
“we could strike fire, maybe.” 

“Or if any of us knew how to rub two sticks to¬ 
gether and make fire,” I said. 

But Jibby Jones was busy before I got it half said. 
He had his knife out and was scraping the handle of 
his lunch-basket, getting fine shreds off it, and he 
splintered some of the basket and made a little pile 
of sticks, like match-sticks, and the next moment he 
was down on his stomach holding his magnifying- 
glass above the little pile so that the concentrated 
rays of the sun fell full on the lint he had scraped. 
In another moment a little string of blue smoke be¬ 
gan to float upward, and then there was a little 
flicker of red flame and the whole little pile was 
ablaze. Jibby fed more pieces of the basket to the 
pile. 

“Now!” he said, “you fellows get some dead 
wood or broken branches and creep to the edge of 
the bank. Wampus, I want you to help me weigh 
this birch down so the fire ball will light that pile of 
stuff. And the minute it is alight, I want Skippy and 
Tad and George to slam the dead wood and stuff at 
those black men, and yell like Indians. Then cut and 
run. I don’t know how much dynamite there is in 
that pile, and I don’t know what it will do when it 
takes a notion to do it.” 

We crept back to the edge of the bank and we had 

242 


A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE 


plenty of dead wood — big chunks of punk, as we 
call it — and we were pretty sure there were going 
to be three surprised black men in about one minute. 
Jibby lit the fire ball and he and Wampus bore the 
little birch tree over and bore it down, and he had 
figured the distance right enough, but the birch 
would not bear all the way down. It went flat 
against the top of the bank, but that stopped it and 
the fire ball was a good two feet above the pile of 
oil-soaked dunnage and food and dynamite. 

“Hold it!” Jibby whispered. “Hold it!” And 
Wampus knelt on the birch. The fire ball blazed 
and sent up black smoke, and in less than a minute 
the string that held it to the birch caught fire and 
burned through and the fire ball fell on the pile of 
stuff. It lay there and burned and the top of the pile 
of stuff caught the flames and began to burn, too. 

“Yip! Ye-ow-wow!” Jibby yelled, like a wild 
Indian, and he picked up a hunk of dead wood and 
let fly at the negroes, and we all did the same, and 
yelled as hard as we could. 

About six out of ten of the things we threw hit 
where we meant them to hit, and those three black 
men jumped to their feet and stared around for just 
about one second of time. They were scared ash 
color, and they did not know where they were for a 
moment, but they saw the black smoke piling up 
from the pile of dunnage and they started down the 
Run faster than we had run from the bumblebees. 

“Dyn’mite! Dyn’mite!” they shouted, but we 

243 


JIBBY JONES 


did not wait to see or hear any more. Jibby was not 
waiting. He legged it away from there, and we were 
not two steps behind him, and when he was deep in 
the woods he threw himself down, and we did as 
Jibby did. It seemed the wisest thing to do. 

We were no more than flat on the ground before 
there came a big, flat, heavy sort of “boom! and 
then sand and small gravel fell on us like a sort of 
rain, and Jibby got up. We went back toward the 
edge of the Run, keeping mighty quiet, and we heard 
the seven men come loping down the creek, and, 
when they reached the place where we had blown up 
their stores, they swore and said they might have 
known it was not safe to trust those worthless 
darks. 

“We-all sure has got miserable luck,” the man 
called Jim said, in a most disgusted way. “Just 
when we find the green sand, we get our stuff 
blowed to nothing. Now we’ve got to go and get 
more feed and more dynamite and more everything. 
It’s bad luck, but I’m right down glad of one thing; 
them darks was blowed clean to nothing, too.” 

They stood there awhile looking at the deep hole 
the blast had blown in the creek bed, and then they 
went on down the Run, growling and complaining, 
and we knew we had a couple of days at least to dig 
for treasure before they came back. We slid down 
the bank and took a look at things ourselves. The 
bushes and grass and weeds had been blown away 
clean, and there was a hole where the sand had been, 

244 


A NEW SWIMMING-HOLE 


ten or twelve feet deep and about twenty-five feet 
long, and as wide as that. 

Jibby Jones sat down on the edge of the hole and 
began to take off his pants, because he did not have 
any shirt to take off — he had torn it to strips. 

“Wampus,” he drawled out, in that slow way of 
his, “you take the kerosene can and go back and 
ask Mrs. Catlin if she will lend us another can of 
kerosene. I’m going to take a bath in the good old 
swimming-hole. I thought maybe there would be 
one on this Run, somewhere.” 

And, sure enough, there was the water trickling 
into that hole, and when Wampus got back with the 
kerosene, Tad and Jibby and Skippy and I were all 
in the pool splashing around and having a gay time. 
Jibby was right; there was a swimming-pool in 
Murrell’s Run. 


CHAPTER XXIII 

TREASURE TROVE 

The new swimming-pool that had been dug out in 
the creek by the explosion was rather muddy, but it 
was wet, and it was fun to think we were swimming 
in a pool nobody had ever swam in before. It was 
like discovering a new ocean or something. 

Wampus put down the can of kerosene. 

“Come on out,” he said. “ If we are going to dig 
for that land pirate’s treasure to-day, we had better 
be burning out the bumblebees and getting at it. 
Bill Catlin was home this time, and he’s coming over. 
He wanted to know what we were going to do with 
the kerosene, and I had to tell him, and he’s going 
to make us give him half of all we find.” 

“Why? What right has he to make us do that?” 
I wanted to know, for I didn’t think Bill Catlin or 
anybody else had a right to any of that treasure 
when Jibby had been the only one to think of it 
being there, and when we had planned so hard to 
get it. 

“Treasure trove, that’s why!” Wampus said. 

And just then Bill Catlin came to the edge of the 
creek bank and looked down at us getting into our 
clothes. 

“Well, boys,” he said, “here I am. I hope we 
find enough to make us all rich and happy all the 

246 


TREASURE TROVE 

rest of our lives. Hurry into your duds and we’ll get 
busy.” 

Jibby Jones was putting on his pants as slow and 
deliberate as if he had all day to do it in, and right 
there I made a mistake. I ought to have kept my 
mouth shut until Jibby had his clothes on and his 
spectacles on and was ready to talk, because that is 
always the safe thing to do. But I had to say my 
say. 

“We don’t need any help,” I said. “We don’t 
want to divide this with anybody. Jibby Jones 
thought of the treasure being here, and it is going 
to be ours — all of it.” 

“That so?” Bill Catlinasked. “Howabout treas¬ 
ure trove, my son?” 

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

“All I mean,” said Bill Catlin, grinning, “is that 
it seems to me I’ve heard somewhere that there’s a 
law of treasure trove, and that half of any hidden 
treasure that is found on any man’s land belongs to 
the man that owns the land.” 

“All right!” I said, quick. “That settles it. 
Wampus’s father owns this land and you don’t.” 

“I lease it,” said Bill Catlin. “I rent it of Wam¬ 
pus’s father. As I look at it, that gives me every¬ 
thing that is on the land or in the land. Why, 
I could order Wampus’s father off this land if 
I wanted to, or the whole lot of you, for that mat¬ 
ter. I could sue you for trespass this very minute, 
if I wanted to, for coming on this land. Sure, I could! 

247 


JIBBY JONES 


I guess that makes me even better than the owner. 
I guess it entitles me to half the treasure we find.” 

What Bill Catlin said took all the wind out of my 
sails in a second. There was one sail it did not take 
the wind out of, though; that was the jib on Jibby 
Jones’s face — the nose he called his jib sail. Jibby 
was hitching up his trousers as if Bill Catlin or noth¬ 
ing in the world mattered a cent. 

“Is that so, Jibby?” Tad Willing asked. 

“He can order us off the place,” Jibby drawled in 
his slow way, “and he can sue us for trespass if we 
don’t go. I know that, because once, when father 
was digging for mastodon bones in a cornfield in 
Arizona, the man that owned the farm ordered 
father off and father did not want to go. So the man 
hit father on the head with a club, and father sued 
him for damages, and the justice of the peace made 
the man pay father five dollars for hitting him, and 
made father pay the man five dollars for trespassing, 
and neither of them had five dollars.” 

“What did they do? Go to jail?” asked Bill Cat¬ 
lin. 

“No, sir,” Jibby said. “The justice of the peace 
lent father five dollars and father paid the man with 
it, and then the man paid father with it, and then 
father paid it back to the justice of the peace. 
Father says the justice said then, ‘There! I hope 
that will be a lesson to both of you. You have got 
off easy. If I had been hard-hearted, I would 
have made you pay each other ten dollars apiece, 

248 


TREASURE TROVE 


and I haven’t got but eight dollars and sixty cents, 
so where would you have been then?”’ 

Bill Catlin laughed, and that made him like Jibby 
Jones right away, because laughing and liking are 
always close together. 

11 1 bet they would have gone to jail, just because 
they lacked a little common sense,” Bill Catlin said. 
“ If I had been there, I could have fixed it up easy. I 
would have had your father borrow the eight dollars 
and sixty cents and pay the man, and then your 
father would have owed him only one dollar and 
forty cents. Then I would have had the man pay the 
money back to your father and the man would have 
owed your father only one dollar and forty cents. 
Then your father would have given the eight dollars 
and sixty cents back to the justice, and he wouldn’t 
have owed him anything. And then all your father 
would have had to do would have been to borrow one 
dollar and forty cents from the justice, and when 
it had passed around, the whole ten dollars would 
have been paid. Nobody would have owed anybody 
anything. Your father and the man could have paid 
each other a million dollars that way. You’ve got to 
use common sense.” 

“Yes, sir,” Jibby said politely. 

It pleased Bill Catlin to have an intelligent-look¬ 
ing boy with tortoise-shell spectacles take what he 
said so seriously, and he was mighty tickled. 

“ You’ve got common sense, and education, too; I 
can see that,” he said to Jibby, which wasn’t saying 

249 


JIBBY JONES 


anything very nice to us, as I looked at it, but we 
didn’t say anything, because we saw Jibby was going 
to talk again. 

“Yes, sir,” Jibby said, as if he was pleased to have 
Bill Catlin compliment him that way. “ I do try to 
know something; I find it comes in handy some¬ 
times. I think it is better than just thinking you 
know something. My father says so. My father says 
it is foolish to read in a story book that a man made 
a trip to the moon and then to think you know that 
a man did make a trip to the moon; my father says 
it is better to find out the true facts first.” 

“And your father knows what he is talking about,” 
Bill Catlin said. 

“Yes, sir,” said Jibby Jones meekly; and then he 
added, in the same meek way, “What book did you 
read about treasure trove in, Mr. Catlin?” 

Well, Bill Catlin sort of looked at Jibby as if he 
hadn’t seen him before. He stared at him. Then he 
got red in the face. 

“What did you ask that for?” he wanted to know. 

“Because in the books I read,” Jibby said, “I 
couldn’t find anything about halves and halves when 
you find treasure. Of course,” he added, “I only 
read some encyclopaedias and law books and things 
like that, as anybody would when they start out to 
dig for treasure. I don’t believe even the biggest 
book weighed over ten pounds, and only a part of 
that one was about hidden treasure, so maybe what 
I think I know don’t amount to much.” 

250 


TREASURE TROVE 


f 


Then Bill Catlin asked him what he had found 
in the books, and Jibby said that “treasure trove” 
meant any gold or silver or money found hidden in 
the ground or in any private place, the ownership of 
which was unknown. In England, Jibby said, the 
treasure that was found belonged to the king and not 
to the finder, but, if the owner was known or was 
discovered later, the treasure belonged to the owner, 
and not to the king or the finder at all, and if the 
finder kept it or hid it he could be jailed. 

“You don’t mean it!” Bill Catlin exclaimed. 

“Yes, sir; that’s what the books say,” Jibby said. 
“And in the United States there isn’t any such 
thing as treasure trove at all. When anything is 
found on the land, it belongs to the man that finds 
it, unless he knows the true owner, and then it be¬ 
longs to the true owner, just as if it was a cow or a 
suit of clothes or a bushel of apples.” 

“Then I don’t come in at all, hey?” Bill Catlin 
said. 

“No, sir,” Jibby said, “but all we have found so 
far is an old 1804 dollar.” 

“Oh, I don’t want that,” said Bill Catlin care¬ 
lessly. He was very much disappointed; I guess he 
had expected to get fifty thousand dollars, maybe. 
“Well,” he said, “I’ll go along and help you burn 
out the bees, anyway.” 

We were all ready to start then, and Wampus 
picked up the can of kerosene and waded across the 
creek, and Tad and Skippy Root and I followed him. 

251 


JIBBY JONES 


Jibby sort of waited for Bill Catlin while Bill slid 
down the bank, and just then we heard voices of 
men. The men were coming up the creek, and we 
knew them by their voices. They were the Jim and 
Jake and the rest that had been up the creek before 
— the tough customers that had come all the way 
from Arkansas to hunt for the Murrell treasure. 
They were coming back. 

I ran up the bank of the creek in a hurry, and so 
did Wampus and Tad and Skippy. I thought sure 
there was going to be trouble if those men caught us, 
and I looked through the trees toward the road, all 
ready to run for it. What I saw made me look twice. 

“Gee whiz!” I said. “Look there, will you!” 

It was enough to make any one look. What Wam¬ 
pus had said to his folks must have leaked out, or 
something, for it looked as if every man and boy in 
Riverbank was coming up the road toward the dead 
pine to dig for that land pirate’s treasure. It looked 
like ten thousand, but I guess it was only about a 
thousand men and boys. There were old men that 
could hardly walk, and boys that were so young 
they could hardly walk, and middle-aged men, and 
even a few women and some girls, and they all had 
spades or picks or shovels. There were plenty of 
boys — dozens of them. And our old friend, the 
Tough Customer tramp, was right there in the front 
of them all. 

I was still looking when Jibby Jones and Bill 
Catlin climbed the bank to where they could see 

252 


TREASURE TROVE 


that great army of treasure-hunters coming up the 
road. Jibby was talking to Bill Catlin, telling him 
who the men were that were coming up the creek, 
and the minute he saw the crowd on the road he 
thought of something. None of the rest of us would 
have thought of it, but Jibby did. 

'‘Mr. Catlin,” he said, "just look at that crowd! 
They’re coming to dig for treasure, and I shouldn’t 
wonder if all the rest of Riverbank came next. It is 
like a rush to the gold fields, or to the oil fields. 
Everybody that can come is coming. Why don’t 
you make some money out of it?” 

"Money? I’m always glad enough to make 
money,” said Bill Catlin, "but how can I make 
money out of that crowd ? ’ ’ 

"You can’t out of all of them,” Jibby said, "but 
you can out of some of them. You could make, any¬ 
way, a dollar apiece out of a lot of them. It’s the 
kind of treasure trove we can go half and half on. 
You have a right to keep all the people off this part 
of your farm, and you have a right to charge them a 
dollar apiece for letting them come on it and dig for 
treasure. If you say so Wampus and George and 
Skippy and Tad will do the collecting. We’ll collect 
a dollar apiece and give you half of it.” 

Bill Catlin thought it over and said: 

"All right; that’s a go.” 

By that time the seven pirate money-hunters had 
come up the creek and were climbing the bank to 
where we were. They looked mean, too. The one 

253 


JIBBY JONES 


called Jim, who was the old land pirate’s great- 
grandson, came right up to us and said: 

“Look here! Are you the folks that blew up our 
stuff? We don’t stand for any business like that. 
You hadn’t any right to do it, and for half a cent 
we’d light into you and break you into pieces and 
chew you up. Now, we’ve got business here and we 
want you to get away from here and stay away.” 

“Yes, sir,” Jibby Jones said in his solemn way. 
“Maybe we will. We didn’t know you owned this 
farm. We thought Wampus Smale’s father owned 
it, and that Mr. Catlin here rented it. We thought 
that anybody that came on the farm without Mr. 
Catlin’s permission was trespassing and could be put 
in jail or something. Why, look at all the people!” 

The man named Jim climbed up the bank and 
looked. He swore. 

“What’s that crowd?” 

“They’re going to hunt for some old land pirate’s 
treasure, I guess,” Jibby said. “I guess they think 
there is some of it hidden around here somewhere. 
But Mr. Catlin thought we would charge them a 
dollar apiece for letting them hunt it. We didn’t 
know you owned this land.” 

“A dollar, hey?” said the land pirate’s great- 
grandson. “Well, we’ll give you a dollar apiece — 
seven dollars for the seven of us — if that’s what 
you want.” 

“Thank you,” Jibby said very politely, and, 
while the land pirate’s great-grandson was counting 

254 


TREASURE TROVE 


out the money, he told Wampus and Skippy and 
Tad and Mr. Catlin and me to go and stop the crowd 
and tell them it cost a dollar a day to hunt land 
pirate’s treasure on this farm. “And tell them to 
look out for the bumblebees,” he said. “We wouldn’t 
like the whole of Riverbank to get all stung up when 
all they are doing is trying to get the treasure before 
we get it.” 

So Bill Catlin and all us boys but Jibby ran to¬ 
ward the crowd to tell them, and one of the first 
men we saw was the sheriff. We boys did not know 
him very well, but Bill Catlin did, and he went up to 
him and warned him that coming on the farm was 
trespass and that he looked to the sheriff to warn 
everybody and to keep off himself. 

The sheriff hated it, but he had to do it, because 
it was his duty. He turned and held up both hands, 
to stop the crowd. 

“ But you can tell them,” Bill Catlin said, just be¬ 
fore the sheriff spoke up, “that they can come on 
the farm and hunt treasure for one dollar each per 
day.” 


CHAPTER XXIV 

THE TREASURE 

So that was what the sheriff told them, and at first 
there was a good deal of complaining, but, when they 
saw that the sheriff and Bill Catlin meant it, they 
formed in line at the corner, and Skippy and Tad 
and Wampus and me collected the dollars. Every 
time we took a dollar we said, “ Thank you. Look 
out for bumblebees under the old dead pine there,” 
and they did look out. Most of them went a good 
distance around the old pine, and every one of them 
made a straight line for the old tumbledown farm¬ 
house as soon as they were safe from the bees. Some 
that did not have money to pay the dollar borrowed 
some from others, but a few could not get in. But 
Eve got to tell you what Jibby was doing. 

As soon as Jibby had the seven dollars from the 
Arkansas men he said: 

“All right, you can hunt treasure now, until mid¬ 
night, but if you don’t find it by then it will cost you 
another seven dollars.” 

“Don’t you worry, son,” the man named Jim 
said. “We’ll find what there is to find before sun¬ 
down, and if you hadn’t blown up our dynamite we 
would have found it in half an hour. We know 
where it is.” 

“That’s good,” said Jibby Jones. “My father 

25b 


THE TREASURE 


always says it is wise to know what you are going to 
do before you do it. So I guess you know the law 
about hidden treasure, too?” 

“ It belongs to the man that owned it in the first 
place,” said the man named Jim, “and I guess that 
as good as means me. I didn’t come all the way up 
here from Arkansas without getting ready before¬ 
hand, like your father says to. I’ve got papers here 
to prove that I’m the great-grandson of old John A. 
Murrell, the land pirate, and that I’m his only heir. 
So that settles that! If great-grandfather was alive, 
it would be his treasure, and if any other Murrells 
were alive part of the treasure would be theirs, but 
I’m the only one alive, so it is mine. That’s all fixed, 
and if there is any treasure there 1 get half, and 
these six friends of mine divide the other half 
among them. That so, men?” 

The six tough-looking Arkansans said it was so. 

“Go and get it, then,” Jibby Jones said. 

Jim and Jake and the other five got together and 
talked awhile in whispers, looking out through the 
trees now and then. They were making plans. The 
crowd from Riverbank was so big it couldn’t all get 
inside the ruined farmhouse and those that couldn’t 
were digging outside of it, and the whole lot — 
those inside and those outside — were shouting and 
quarreling and carrying on the way money-crazy 
people do. It was like a riot or something, and all 
the while more strings of people were coming up the 
road and stopping to pay us a dollar, and then rush- 

257 


JIBBY JONES 

ing for the old farmhouse, afraid they would not get 
there in time. 

The seven Arkansans had their spades and shovels 
and picks, and they got together in a bunch, and 
when Jim gave the word they started across the 
weedy field with a rush, and straight for the old 
signal pine, too. Jibby watched them until they were 
halfway across the field, and then he came wander¬ 
ing toward where we boys and Bill Catlin were col¬ 
lecting money from the late comers. We had our 
pockets full of silver dollars and bills and small 
change. 

'‘That’s pretty good,” Jibby said, “but we made 
one mistake.” 

“What do you mean?” I said. “Do you mean we 
should have brought a gunnysack to carry the 
money in?” 

“No,” he said; “we ought to have advertised in 
the Riverbank ‘ Eagle ’ — the weekly edition of it 
that goes to the farmers. Everybody in town knows 
about the hidden treasure by now, but the farmers 
don’t. We ought to have put an advertisement in 
the paper so the farmers could have paid us a dollar 
apiece, too. But I suppose no one can think of 
everything.” 

We all turned just then, because one of the 
Arkansas men had let out a yell. A bumblebee had 
just stung him. The next moment another one let 
out a yell; he had got his sting, too. 

The Arkansas men had gone at the old pine tree 

258 


THE TREASURE 


slam bang, because they knew they had to work 
fast. They knew that, as soon as the men and boys 
by the farmhouse saw them digging at the tree, 
there would be a rush for the tree, so they all piled 
into the work at once and as hard as they could, and 
there is nothing bumblebees hate so much as they 
hate just that. They hate hurry. 

In a moment the whole seven Arkansans were 
hopping and swearing and slashing at their necks 
and beating at the air, but they kept right on dig¬ 
ging and picking and whacking at the tree. They 
made more than chips fly. Whang would go a pick 
into the dead wood and out would come a big slice 
of tree, and all the while the whole seven were 
jumping and yelling and cussing like crazy men. 

Then some of the crowd began to run from the old 
farmhouse toward the old pine, and then others be¬ 
gan to run, but, when the first man came near the 
tree, he yelled like fury and slapped the back of his 
neck and began to dance, and then he ran. He ran 
zigzag, but he ran away from the tree. The rest of 
the Riverbankers stopped, and when he reached 
them they asked what was the matter and he must 
have said “Bees!” for they all crowded back. They 
made me think of the mob in a movie. They went 
back a step at a time as if a director was saying, 
“Now! Mob — back one step; show fear; back an¬ 
other step!” Only it was bees doing the directing 
this time. 

Then the Arkansans gave it up, all but Jim. He 

259 


JIBBY JONES 


wrapped his coat around his head and dug and 
hopped but of a sudden he dropped his pick and hit 
himself in four or six places and jerked the coat 
from his head and came loping toward us sweeping 
the air with the coat, all around his head. He had 
not found the treasure, but he had found the bees’ 
nest, and as he came toward us we scooped up the 
money and held our pockets and ran. 

We had so much money we were weighted down 
with it, and we had to run easy or spill it, but we 
made pretty good time. Not a bee got us. We ran 
down the road toward Riverbank a hundred yards 
or so, and that was far enough, for the seven Arkan¬ 
sans only came about fifty yards and they were 
making it lively for the bumblebees, and the bumble¬ 
bees were making it lively for them. Neither of 
them had time for anything else just then. 

While we were all scattered that way, we saw one 
man come out of the Riverbank crowd and walk 
right up to the dead pine. It was the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer. He had tied his pants tight around his ankle, 
and he had pulled his shirt up around his head, and 
he had his one woolen sock on one hand for a mitten 
and a red handkerchief tied around the other hand. 
With his coat on, there wasn’t a place a bee could 
get at him, and he hobbled right up to the dead 
pine and picked up the pick Jim had thrown down, 
and began to dig. 

Jibby Jones looked disgusted. 

“Dear me!” he said. “I don’t like that at all! I 

260 


THE TREASURE 


did hope we might find that treasure ourselves, but 
I certainly think it is a shame for the Tough Cus¬ 
tomer to find it after all the trouble we took to make 
him depart.” 

This was too much for Wampus. 

“What do you care who digs it up, Jibby?” he 
asked. “That Jim fellow gets it, anyway. You said 
yourself that, no matter whose land it was found on 
and no matter who found it, the treasure belonged 
to whoever owned it first. It wouldn’t be us, if we 
found it, and it won’t be the Tough Customer, if he 
finds it. The treasure will belong to that Jim man 
from Arkansas, because he is the heir of old John A. 
Murrell, and John A. Murrell was the first owner.” 

The only answer Jibby gave to that was to reach 
out a hand and feel of Wampus’s shirt, but he didn’t 
like the feel of it, so he felt of mine and he seemed to 
like it better. 

“Take off your shirt, George,” he said, slow and 
calm, as if he had all day to waste, and he took off 
his own shoes and pulled off his socks. “I don’t 
think that tramp has brains,” he said, “but I think 
he has robbed honey hives, and sometimes experi¬ 
ence is as good as brains.” 

I had my shirt off now, for I can work pretty 
quick when I have to, and then Jibby began pulling 
it over his head. 

“Mr. Catlin,” he said, “ I see those Arkansawyers 
are not fighting bees now” — but how he saw that 
with my shirt over his head I don’t know — “and 

261 


JIBBY JONES 


they are not digging treasure. They seem to be look¬ 
ing at the sheriff as if they did not like him. And I 
never did like them much. I never did think that 
men who come sneaking up a creek or up any back 
way were thoroughly honest men. I wonder if it 
would be a good thing for the sheriff to walk over to 
them and tell them that they have gone off the 
farm into the road and that they will have to pay 
another dollar to get back onto the farm again? If 
you think that would be a good thing, and you want 
to tell it to the sheriff, maybe you had better tell the 
sheriff to pin on his badge so it can be seen.” 

Bill Catlin grinned. 

“I think it might be a good thing,” he laughed. 

“Thank you,” Jibby said, “and it might not 
hurt anybody if the sheriff ran toward the Arkan- 
sawyers to tell them. Maybe they would like to 
know it as soon as possible, so they can make plans.” 

Jibby was ready now to go and help the Tough 
Customer dig treasure and he started. He did not 
bother to try to see what the Arkansawyers did, but 
we saw. They were standing in the road, looking at 
the sheriff and the badge on his coat, and were talk¬ 
ing among themselves when Bill Catlin went up to 
the sheriff and spoke to him and pointed to the Ar¬ 
kansas men. The sheriff nodded his head, and looked 
down to see that his badge was in plain sight, and 
then he started for the seven Arkansas men, going 
pretty fast. Those seven men took one look at him 
and at Bill Catlin and turned and ran across country, 

262 


THE TREASURE 


jumping the fence and getting away from there as 
fast as they could. 

That was the last we ever saw of them. I don’t 
know what was on their minds, but they must have 
had mighty guilty consciences about something. 
Guilty consciences have no use for a sheriff. 

There were plenty of bumblebees left by the old 
pine tree, and the Tough Customer had to keep 
batting at the holes in his shirt that he had made to 
see through, but Jibby had the best of that because 
he was wearing his tortoise-shell rimmed spectacles, 
and no bee, not even a bumblebee, can sting through 
glass. He picked up a spade and began to dig, and 
he had hardly stuck spade into the ground twice be¬ 
fore he had hit a metal box. He jammed the spade 
in again, and pried on the handle and up came the 
box. He did not wait there. He grabbed the box 
and ran. 

The Tough Customer could not see very well, but 
he knew somebody was getting something that he 
was not getting and he pulled his shirt from his head. 
It was a bad mistake. Jibby was gone and the 
treasure box was gone, but the bees were not all 
gone. One of them told the Tough Customer so and 
told him quick and hard, and for the next minute the 
Tough Customer was not thinking of treasure; he 
was thinking of bees. 

Jibby came running to where we were, and the 
whole of Riverbank — or all those that had come 
out to hunt treasure — came running after him, to 

263 


JIBBY JONES 


see what he had found. They got to us just as we 
had all crowded around Jibby and when he was 
stamping on the box with his heel to break it open. 
It broke open easy enough. 

I jumped at it and grabbed for the gold money 
that was in it. It was not much; it was only one hun¬ 
dred gold pieces — ten-dollar pieces — one thou¬ 
sand dollars in all, but Jibby was opening a faded 
piece of old paper that had been in the box. 

The writing on the paper was so old we could 
hardly read it, but we did make it out. This is what 
it said : 

John — I have abided in this locality twenty years now, 
but no word from you and very poor living here, so mean 
to go to California, thinking shall do better gold mining 
than farming. Am taking that which you left with me 
and will keep it twenty more years, as you said to do, be¬ 
fore I touch any of it. If you hunt me look for me near a 
signal pine as agreed. I am leaving one thousand dollars 
in case you come and need it to pay expenses. It is part 
of what you sent. Murrell 

So that was what the land pirate’s treasure 
amounted to, but one thousand dollars is a lot better 
than nothing. I believe one man from Riverbank 
did go to California to look for a signal pine and to 
hunt for treasure under it, but probably he did not 
find it. There are millions of pine trees in Cali¬ 
fornia, or trees that would do for pine trees. 

When we counted up, we found we had taken in 
eight hundred and fifty-six dollars from the River- 

264 


THE TREASURE 


bank treasure-hunters, and we got half of it, which 
was eighty-five dollars and sixty cents apiece for 
Jibby Jones and Wampus and Skippy Root and 
Tad and me, because we had to give Bill Catlin his 
half first. And then we got two hundred dollars 
apiece of the one thousand dollars that was in the 
box that Jibby had dug up. We didn’t send it to Jim 
from Arkansas, even if he was John A. Murrell’s 
great-grandson. I’ll tell you why. 

When Jibby was opening the box, the Tough 
Customer and nearly all the Riverbankers came 
crowding around to see what Jibby had found, and 
when they saw, one of the men said: 

“Pshaw! Only a thousand dollars! That don’t 
amount to much.” 

“No,” I said, “and we can’t keep it, anyway, be¬ 
cause in this country hidden treasure has to be 
given back to whoever the first owner was, or to his 
heirs, and we know who the first owner was and we 
know who his heir is.” 

Right there Jibby Jones surprised us. 

“No,” he said, “we don’t know. We’re going to 
keep this money ourselves, because we don’t know 
who the real owner was, and we never can find out.” 

“Why can’t we?” I asked him. 

“Because nobody in the world knows who the 
first owner was,” Jibby said. “John A. Murrell 
never did own it; he stole it. The man he stole it 
from was the real owner, and John A. Murrell never 
did have any right to have it. And how can you ever 

265 


JIBBY JONES 


find out who owned it away back in 1835? Nobody 
could do that. So it is ours and we’ll keep it.” 

And we did. We were just starting back for town 
when all at once Jibby Jones stopped short. 

“Wait!” he said. “I’ve almost forgotten some¬ 
thing. I’ve got to go back to the creek.” 

“My land!” Wampus said. “What for?” 

“To get two grains of that green sand for my 
collection of grains of sand,” Jibby said. “You can 
never tell what will happen. To-morrow, or before 
I have a chance to get a specimen, my father may 
decide to go to Chile or China or Chattanooga. But, 
hold on a minute!” 

He sat down at the edge of the road and took off 
his shoe and looked in it. 

“It’s all right!” he said. “We can go on back to 
town. I’ve got five or six grains right here in my 
shoe.” 

So that was how we went back to town from our 
treasure-hunting. Skippy and Tad and Wampus 
and I carried the money and Jibby Jones came 
along behind us with one shoe on, carrying the 
other shoe in both hands as if it was a plate of soup, 
because I do believe he was more interested in not 
losing those grains of green sand than in all the 
treasure John A. Murrell ever hid. 

But that was the way Jibby Jones was. 


THE END 






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